[Stosh]

Nucleic acids are made up of bases attached to sugars connected by phosphates.

As best as I can tell from the newspaper article (and since it’s about science, the writer probably barely knows what he’s writing about), the researchers just changed the structure of the sugars to something identifiably different, but not drastically so. Kind of like putting a Hummer body on an F-150 frame - you can do it, it’s kind of neat, but it’s not like you invented a hovercraft or something.

Looks like a nice piece of work, but it’s not a new, revolutionary precursor to a novel form of life, or at least that’s not likely - I don’t expect ET will be writing home about it.

[OldNavyVet]

From the LA Times article ... Researchers at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, demonstrated that six synthetic molecules that are similar to — but not exactly like — DNA and RNA have the potential to exhibit "hallmarks of life" such as storing genetic information, passing it along and undergoing evolution. The man-made molecules are called "XNAs."

From page 8 of “Darwin’s Ghost” by Steve Jones. “The best evidence for a theory comes when two experiments give the same result.”

Given the above, it looks like the theory has been validated six times.