On Nov 29, NASA stated that they will hold a press conference on Dec 2, "to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life".
It posed two thoughts.
1) This is huge. 'Astrobiological find' means something related to lifeforms in space and since they promised it will have an impact on the search for evidence of life out of Earth, this could really be something.
or
2) This is another NASA's sensationalist promise; they've been notorious to give notice of a forthcoming huge press releases in the past and it's always been a let down: they either find a theory that supports the theory that there might have been a cupful of fungi on Saturn's 17th moon or something silly like that.
The outcome?
Kind of something in between. They didn't find aliens this time, they didn't actually find any new life in space.
They found a new life here, on Earth.
Every life form on Earth consists of building blocks of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. That's it. Nothing else. Every single life form on this planet shares this basic life characteristic, it doesn't matter if it's a snail, human or blue whale; our DNA is made of the same building blocks.
NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria named GFAJ-1, which, instead of phosphorus, uses poisonous arsenic in its building blocks. This revelation makes this organism truly unique because there's no other life form like that on Earth.
Why is this finding important, you ask? This changes everything about our current assumptions and theories about life. This discovery proves that life, including extraterrestrial life, could have a different chemical makeup than life on Earth.
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