With holiday shopping and Nebraska coaching rumors, you might have missed the NASA announcement that challenges our assumptions about the building blocks of life. Turns out that arsenic-based lifeforms can exist. That’s a big deal to NASA because it means the next time we go hunting for life outside of our little planet, we shouldn’t just look for aliens made of the old reliables: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Couple that with the report that there are three times as many stars up there as previously thought and it makes you wonder what might be out there.

Around the holidays, it also is a scientific message that carries a little bit of hope. Life, it seems, finds a way.