Whoa, nelly. This sounds serious.
“The first organism able to substitute one of the six chemical elements crucial to life has been found.
The bacterium, found in a California lake, uses the usually poisonous element arsenic in place of phosphorus.
The find, described in Science, gives weight to the long-standing idea that life on other planets may have a radically different chemical makeup.
It also has implications for the way life arose on Earth - and how many times it may have done so.”
