NASA has announced that they’ve found new life. As Gizmodo puts it, “[the] life form—called GFAJ-1— doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. It’s capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes.
“NASA is saying that this is ‘life as we do not know it.’ The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.”
My first thought on reading this is that I’ve seen this new life, and it was in a river in New Jersey. (I’m from New Jersey, so I get to say that.) But then I read further and learned that scientists then found a very similar life form on Earth that uses arsenic rather than phosphorous for its molecular building blocks. Where did they find it? Mono Lake, California. Make of that what you will.
My final thought is: I’m surprised that they’re surprised. Haven’t any of them seen “The Andromeda Strain”? My father and two older brothers took me to see that when I was nine, and to this day I’m as thrilled about that movie as I was then. The “Strain” of the title is an alien biological infestation that, wait for it, lacks ways we recognize to create DNA, RNA, proteins and amino acids. In other words, it’s “impossible” life that’s similar to what we just found. And which all of we science fiction fans have been expecting for 40 years.
“Yes, I know he can be annoying to you. All right, really annoying. But some day when you’re both older, you’re going to be good friends. Really. He’s even going to stand for you in your wedding. You’ll see. You might not believe it, but Aunt Lorie? She was really mean to me. Really mean. And she was older than me, and bigger, and mean. See how well we get along now? So you need to overlook what he does sometimes. No, I haven’t forgotten her meanness, but still, we get along. So some day you and your little brother will be good friends. You’ll see. Really. But in the meantime, while the escalating pitch of your voice yelling at him is having no impact on him, it is doing something else: It’s driving me crazy. So please stop.”
Forget the news; if you can’t trust your own eyes, what can you believe? But, just as with a lot of what purports to be news, sometimes what you believe you’re seeing is an illusion. Here’s a great one I found online today, with a handy notification to hit pause in the middle if you don’t want the trick revealed. I figured out right away how this was done, and you can too if you watch closely.
The Pew Research Center has put out a brief survey that looks at just what Americans know about the news. I would say the ignorance is shocking… except sadly it isn’t. I don’t want to tell you specifically where people were wrong, because I think you’ll want to take the test first. But in a nutshell, lots of Americans are wrong about: the unemployment rate, the degree to which the TARP “bailout” has been paid back, the results of the mid-term elections, where government expenditures go, and so forth. The quiz covers what I think (hope) most of us would think are the basics of the current (non-celebrity) news cycle. And the results explain a lot.
