extraterrestrials
Scientists have known for a while that the building blocks of Earth life, amino acids, are also found in space. Traces of amino acids have been studied in countless meteorites. But now Arizona State researcher Sandra Pizzarello says Earth amino acids also share the same basic structure with those from distant space. This discovery, announced yesterday in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could mean that extraterrestrial life would share other structural similarities with Earth life — like symmetrical bodies, for instance — especially if that life had developed from amino acids the way we did.
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