Her Discovery Wasn’t Alien Life, however Science Has By no means Been the Identical

With TV cameras pointed at her, Felisa Wolfe-Simon started talking at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 2, 2010.

“I’ve found — I’ve led a group that has found — one thing that I’ve been excited about for a few years,” Dr. Wolfe-Simon stated. She was at the moment a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, chatting with a large viewers of journalists and bloggers, two of them carrying tinfoil hats, and hordes of streamers on-line.

Days earlier than, NASA had teased “an astrobiology discovering that can influence the seek for proof of extraterrestrial life.” Hypothesis that NASA had found some sort of alien life bred exponentially throughout nascent social media platforms.

Dr. Wolfe-Simon had, sadly, not discovered aliens, nor had she ever stated she did. However she had discovered a terrestrial organism that was behaving in contrast to any life kind identified on Earth.

The creature got here from the mud of Mono Lake, a physique of water close to Yosemite Nationwide Park that’s almost 3 times as salty because the Pacific Ocean. The lake has the pH stage of glass cleaner and, most significantly for her group’s discovery, is stuffed with poisonous arsenic.

All identified dwelling issues use six main chemical components to maintain their our bodies churning. One is phosphorus. However from Mono Lake, Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s group stated they’d remoted an organism that might substitute phosphorus with arsenic.