WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A strange, salty lake in California has yielded an equally strange bacterium that thrives on arsenic and redefines life as we know it, researchers reported on Thursday.

The bacteria do not merely eat arsenic -- they incorporate the toxic element directly into their DNA, the researchers said.

The finding shows just how little scientists know about the variety of life forms on Earth, and may greatly expand where they should be looking for life on other planets and moons, the NASA-funded team said.

"We have cracked open the door to what is possible for life elsewhere in the universe," Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and U.S. Geological Survey, who led the study, told a news conference.

Read the full article here

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"Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars"

I saw this, and while I respect the science aspect of it, I'm always bothered by what we tend to call "life"...

Personally, I don't think of this as "life", to me, somewhere in the neighborhood of a common house fly does "life" begin...

I guess everybody draws their line in sand in different places and may even look at the same line with different perspectives, but I tend to not use "life" until we're talking about an organisms ability to process at least 5 senses and use judgment among other brain wielding characteristics...


i.e., life shall be defined henceforth as this. When I approach it, it has the ability, whether it actually does or not, to make a decision about me, ask me questions, and then decide to either pick up it own version of a gun and shoot me dead or not...

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Fantom Thrust - SHW Battlebot
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We can easily program crude Robots to do this.....Are they alive?

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"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct." -- Carl Sagan

I would argue that the decision part is not programmable in the sense/context inferred...

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Fantom Thrust - SHW Battlebot
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But you can program something to make decisions based on pre-selected conditions.

Why is that different?

We all base decisions on pre-existing experiances.

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"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct." -- Carl Sagan

Because humans (or other intelligent life...) can make decisions that are based on either more than the sum of either one or many binary decisions or even more importantly can use intuition and go against the sum of those binary inputs...

I don't accept the notion of AI ever equating to the human condition, if I did, I would probably go shoot myself right now...


Ok, I guess I wouldn't shoot myself, but I would take it upon myself to "eliminate" any mechanical devices vying for superiority or even just equality... ...starting with the power source sometimes known as the "plug"...

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Fantom Thrust - SHW Battlebot
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Additionally, and I appreciate that this was posted with tongue in cheek, and also noting the image of me in my avatar, this image, if it existed in reality, would scare the crap out of me, and not from a lethality standpoint, but from a social standpoint.

Yes, this does include things like the Global Hawk and anything similar to it... As soon as we remove humans from war, war becomes to easy, and when war is easy, then we have failed, even if we are on the winning side...

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Fantom Thrust - SHW Battlebot
Dell M6300 - loaded
Dell M6700 - loaded
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