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RATS ON MARS

No, it’s not the concept of a bad B-movie. The folks over at Space.com have spied what looks to be Pareidolia rats. In one of the many images captured by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity it appears that a large rodent of some sort is scampering across the Red Planet’s surface. Considering Mars has an extremely thin atmosphere unable to support life, the existence of R.O.U.S’es darting around around the craters and extinct volcanoes seems a little more than far fetched.

However, there are several conspiracy theory camps that believe we are being fed incorrect, color-altered images of Mars that do not reflect the supposed vast forests and oceans there. If this were case, though, I think Curiosity would be catching more than rats in its sites. As with the previous post from yesterday with the Misfits-tagged rocks being a “fossilized creature”, me thinks this too is just an optical illusion. To paraphrase Freud: Sometimes a rock, is just a rock. But I could be wrong—it’s been known to happen on occasion.

What do you see in the image below?

dnews-mars-rat

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NASA SPIES FOSSILIZED CREATURE ON MARS

The latest snapshots of the surface of Mars has revealed what some are saying is a “fossilized creature.” Personally, it looks like someone tagged a rock with artwork from a Misfits album cover. Here are the original raw images directly from NASA itself. What do you think?

nasa-fossilized-creature-mars-2013

fossilized-creature-mars-2013

Image Source : NASA

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00107/mcam/0107MR0682050000E1_DXXX.jpg

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00107/mcam/0107MR0682049000E1_DXXX.jpg

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VIKING ROBOTS FOUND LIFE ON MARS IN 1976, SCIENTISTS SAY

 

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows that 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’sKeck 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 reanalyzed 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.

 

Read more:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47031923/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.T4oldpj5n8s

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