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http://science.howstuffworks.com/weird-life.htm

Well we possibly* found life, but its not carbon based, so yeah.

CONTRADICTION

They are coming 2012 dec…just you wait…

"found" != "could potentially be found"

cool like in the Andromeda Strain

@Chris Menning

Good find.

"which were performed on the International Space Station and in a zero-gravity environment at a German research facility, the plasma crystals sometimes developed into corkscrew shapes or even the double-helix shape of DNA"

Also to continue on with the rest of the paragraph.

"These helix-shaped crystals retain an electric charge and show what the researchers called a self-organizing ability."

I am still confused about this, so we created them?

So really if its just DNA wouldn't it be primitive space virus, made out of crystal?

So its one step away from life.

Also they made a error if its a virus it should say RNA, not DNA.

Another thing I should add, is that a virus is only not living because it cant reproduce(technically they reproduce by invading cells and forcing the cell to make copys of the virus), but in this article they state that they evolve, and reproduce.

"Once in helix form, the crystals can reproduce by diving into two identical helixes"

Which is totally mind boggling on what the heck are they defining this by, because if they state its a virus because its not made of carbon, and does not need water, than this does not please me..

Now kids turn to page 3436 in your biology book..

When I read it, it just seemed like plasma crystals have some self-organizing traits that behave similar to life.

…magnets…

@Chris Menning

"The diameter of the helixes varies throughout the structure and the arrangement of these various sections is replicated in other crystals, passing on what could be called a form of genetic code."

You know I thought of that, but its not exactly a clump of magnets, as it goes in helixes, much like our own DNA.

Also magnets do not separate from each other, and replicate.

I also found some other information on this from the sources.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=weird-life.htm&url=http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1367-2630/9/8/263

If you read the abstract its fairly interesting since it mentions a metabolism.