Monday, December 6, 2010

APOD 2.5

Mono Lake

Life until this point was thought to have required phosphorous. It is now known that life can be made of arsenic, as seen in the picture of the arsenic base life in the upper left hand corner found in Mono Lake. Mono Lake gives us hope that life will be found on other planets. This could mean that life could also exist from many other kinds of elements, and that the search must begin. Life starts as bacteria, but in billions of years, arsenic based life might flourish. The discovery though was a little underwhelming. When studying for unknown life, you definitely want to find something larger than 10 picometers, but this is a good start.

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