NASA had us all on the edge of our seats last week when it announced that it will have a news conference (set on December 2) concerning on an astrobiological find:

NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Astrobiology is their cute scientific term for studying the possibilites of extraterrestrial life forms. To make a long story short, NASA has been spending millions of bucks looking for aliens in outer space. And with last week’s mysterious announcement, they had us thinking that they must have captured an oversized, human-legged cockroach from Planet Zula which has been revolving around our Moon. Or perhaps they have finally decided to reveal what we all suspect that they have been hiding all these years in Roswell.

After all the excitement, all they provided in that much-hyped news conference were more theories:

One of the basic assumptions about life on Earth may be due for a revision thanks to research supported by NASA’s Astrobiology Program. Geomicrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon has discovered a bacterium in California’s Mono Lake that uses arsenic instead of phosphorus in its DNA. Up until now, it was believed that all life required phosphorus as a fundamental piece of the ‘backbone’ that holds DNA together. The discovery of an organism that thrives on otherwise poisonous arsenic broadens our thinking about the possibility of life on other planets, and begs a rewrite of biology textbooks by changing our understanding of how life is formed from its most basic elemental building blocks. Astrobiology Magazine has the story.

NASA, what the people want is a caged alien, complete with fangs and gooey material. Not a couple of germs emitting acidic crap. If you can’t give it, better shut up with your announcements.