Egg-shaped globule could be evidence of life on Mars

An ‘egg-shaped’ object, which was found inside a Martian meteorite that fell to Earth last year, could be final proof of life on the Red Planet.

Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe has asserted that the globule from the rock named Tissint is rich in carbon and oxygen and insisted that they could only have been produced by living organisms.

He said that they could not have been caused by contamination when they fell to Earth.

“It is impossible to understand how carbon-rich particles of such uniform sizes and shapes got inside a rocky matrix if they are not relics of some algal species,” the Sun quoted Prof Wickramasinghe, 72, who is famous for controversial ideas such as that the flu virus and even life itself was brought to our planet by comets, as saying.

“Tissint was collected weeks after it fell, and terrestrial contamination seems unlikely. In any case the structures we found were on newly fractured surfaces, from the interior of the meteorite.”

Continued:  http://www.phenomenica.com/2012/05/egg-shaped-globule-could-be-evidence-of-life-on-mars.html

Mars Viking Robots 'Found Life'

Mathematical analysis adds to growing body of work questioning the negative results of a life-detection experiment 36 years ago.

THE GIST
New results question the finding that the Mars Viking experiments did not find life.

The analysis was based on studying the mathematically complexity of the periment results.

The idea is that living systems are more complicated than purely physical ones, a concept that can be represented mathematically.

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.

Further, NASA doesn't need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told
Discovery News.

"The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope -- watch the bacteria move," Miller said.

"On the basis of what we've done so far, I'd say I'm 99 percent sure there's life there," he added.

Miller's confidence stems in part from a new study that re-analyzed results from a life-detection experiment conducted by NASA's Viking Mars robots in 1976.

Researchers crunched raw data collected during runs of the Labeled Release experiment, which looked for signs of microbial metabolism in soil samples scooped up and processed by the two Viking landers. General
consensus of scientists has been that the experiment found geological, not biological, activity.

The new study took a different approach. Researchers distilled the Viking Labeled Release data, provided as hard copies by the original researchers, into sets of numbers and analyzed the results for complexity. Since living systems are more complicated than non-biological processes, the idea was to look at the experiment results from a purely numerical perspective.

They found close correlations between the Viking experiment results' complexity and those of terrestrial biological data sets. They say the high degree of order is more characteristic of biological, rather than
purely physical processes.

Critics counter that the method has not yet been proven effective for differentiating between biological and non-biological processes on Earth so it's premature to draw any conclusions.

"Ideally to use a technique on data from Mars one would want to show that the technique has been well calibrated and well established on Earth. The need to do so is clear; on Mars we have no way to test the
method, while on Earth we can," planetary scientist and astrobiologist Christopher McKay, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told Discovery News.

While not iron-clad, Miller says the findings are an additional plank of evidence challenging the popularly contention that Viking did not find life.

He also is reanalyzing the data to see if there are variations when sunlight was blocked by a weeks-long dust storm on Mars, with the idea being that biological systems would have acted differently to the environmental change than geologic ones. Results of the research are expected to be presented in August.

The research is published online in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences.