The human race has been obsessed with finding Alien life for centuries. Turns out, they may actually exist - not in the planets far beyond, but right here on Earth. And the discovery was made by none other than the smart scientists of NASA, who announced their big news amidst much fanfare, at a press conference held in Washington D.C. on December 2nd.
Unfortunately for most of us, the 'aliens' are not little green men who have mistakenly arrived from a distant planet, but a bacterium identified as the GFAJ-1 strain of the Halomonadaceae family, which was discovered at the bottom of Northern California's highly saline, Mono Lake.
Until the discovery of this bacteria, scientists had always believed that for any organism to grow, there had to be carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur and most importantly phosphorous - all essential building materials for proteins, fats and DNA, the nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions about the development and function in living creatures.
To test their theory, they extracted the bacteria from the lake and starved it for phosphorous, substituting it with arsenic, which while chemically similar to phosphorous is highly poisonous to most living things. The bacteria continued to grow, leading the scientists to conclude that it had successfully substituted the phosphorous with the arsenic.
The fact that this life form uses what was considered a poison as one of the building blocks for its body, is what makes scientist classify it as an Alien. It has led experts to think that maybe life form is much more flexible than they had originally believed, and that it can actually exist without everything being perfect - Which gives them even more hope that there may be life forms on Planets that we didn't originally believe were habitable - Watch out Aliens, we are on to you now!
Sources: Gizmag.com,Nasa.gov