{"id":21959,"date":"2025-02-11T06:50:16","date_gmt":"2025-02-11T07:50:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=21959"},"modified":"2025-02-11T08:24:24","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T08:24:24","slug":"her-discovery-wasnt-alien-life-but-science-has-never-been-the-same","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=21959","title":{"rendered":"Her Discovery Wasn\u2019t Alien Life, but Science Has Never Been the Same"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With TV cameras pointed at her, Felisa Wolfe-Simon began speaking at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 2, 2010<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve discovered \u2014 I\u2019ve led a team that has discovered \u2014 something that I\u2019ve been thinking about for many years,\u201d Dr. Wolfe-Simon said. She was at that time a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, speaking to a sizable audience of journalists and bloggers, two of them wearing tinfoil hats, and hordes of streamers online.<\/p>\n

Days before, NASA had teased \u201can astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.\u201d Speculation that NASA had discovered some kind of alien life bred exponentially across nascent social media platforms.<\/p>\n

Dr. Wolfe-Simon had, unfortunately, not found aliens, nor had she ever said she did. But she had <\/em>found a terrestrial organism that was behaving unlike any life form known on Earth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The creature came from the mud of Mono Lake, a body of water near Yosemite National Park that is nearly three times as salty as the Pacific Ocean. The lake has the pH level of glass cleaner and, most importantly for her team\u2019s discovery, is full of toxic arsenic.<\/p>\n

All known living things use six major chemical elements to keep their bodies churning. One is phosphorus. But from Mono Lake, Dr. Wolfe-Simon\u2019s team said they had isolated an organism that could replace phosphorus with arsenic.<\/p>\n

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With TV cameras pointed at her, Felisa Wolfe-Simon began speaking at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 2, 2010.\u201cI\u2019ve discovered \u2014 I\u2019ve led a team that has discovered \u2014 something that I\u2019ve been thinking about for many years,\u201d Dr. Wolfe-Simon said. She was at that time a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, speaking to a sizable audience of journalists and bloggers, two of them wearing tinfoil hats, and hordes of streamers online.Days before, NASA had teased \u201can astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.\u201d Speculation that NASA had discovered some kind of alien life bred exponentially across nascent social media platforms.Dr. Wolfe-Simon had, unfortunately, not found aliens, nor had she ever said she did. But she had found a terrestrial organism that was behaving unlike any life form known on Earth.The creature came from the mud of Mono Lake, a body of water near Yosemite National Park that is nearly three times as salty as the Pacific Ocean. The lake has the pH level of glass cleaner and, most importantly for her team\u2019s discovery, is full of toxic arsenic.All known living things use six major chemical elements to keep their bodies churning. One is phosphorus. But from Mono Lake, Dr. Wolfe-Simon\u2019s team said they had isolated an organism that could replace phosphorus with arsenic.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21961,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21959"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21962,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21959\/revisions\/21962"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}