Aliens. For real this time.
 

At 2:00pm EST today NASA will announce they have found alien life.

In a lake in California. You guys get all the cool stuff.

interesting. thanks for the tip

where does it say in a lake in ca? Or was that a joke?

No Joke. It's alien life (not extraterrestrial life) that was discovered in Mono Lake, California. It's life based on arsenic. I expect details will be all over the place after the formal announcement.

The basic gist of the announcement have made it out elsewhere.

Here, for instance.

It seems to have something to do with some bacteria found in Mono Lake that might prove that life can exist even without the same set of chemicals we usually consider "essential" to support life.

I like the comment at the end of the article:

Mono Lake already looks like an alien planet. The Tufa Towers are so fascinating.

The Conference is starting, and more news is out.

Ok, so this "bug" uses Arsenic rather than phosphorous but now I'm not clear, is this a branch from our current tree of life doing something freaky or an entirely new and separate tree. The so called shadow ecosystem.

Branch. It's not completely devoid of phosphorous, and actually grow better in its presence, but they just happen to also be able to use arsenic if phosphorous isn't around. They are not part of the "shadow biosphere" and have been shown to belong to the same order as the strains of bacteria that digest petroleum.

So says discover