Long-form astrobiology posts likely on hold until April due to the constant rolling crisis that is finishing up my PhD and writing my thesis (I have been attached to the microscope or bioreactor for ~50 of the last 72 hours).
May bang out one or two quick thinly sourced things when the itch hits. In the mean time, have a fun paper from Nature Communications arguing that some ancient (~3.6 billion year old) Martian hydrothermal deposits examined by the Spirit rover are not inconsistent with an origin via microbial action in a hot spring environment and are similar in coarse structure to modern microbial structures from such settings in the Atacama desert. They could not be examined in situ by the instruments at hand in enough detail to say more than that. The authors cover themselves by concluding “Although fully abiotic processes are not ruled out for the Martian silica structures, they satisfy an a priori definition of potential biosignatures”.
Long-form astrobiology posts likely on hold until April due to the constant rolling crisis that is finishing up my PhD and writing my thesis (I have been attached to the microscope or bioreactor for ~50 of the last 72 hours).
May bang out one or two quick thinly sourced things when the itch hits. In the mean time, have a fun paper from Nature Communications arguing that some ancient (~3.6 billion year old) Martian hydrothermal deposits examined by the Spirit rover are not inconsistent with an origin via microbial action in a hot spring environment and are similar in coarse structure to modern microbial structures from such settings in the Atacama desert. They could not be examined in situ by the instruments at hand in enough detail to say more than that. The authors cover themselves by concluding “Although fully abiotic processes are not ruled out for the Martian silica structures, they satisfy an a priori definition of potential biosignatures”.
http://www.space.com/34795-mars-life-nasa-spirit-rover.html
http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13554