Life On Mars?

[The Empirical Guy]

Apologies to Creepyklutz, who's FB news feed I stole this off of. But here you go:

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's 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 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.

"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, the findings are an additional plank of evidence challenging the popular contention that Viking did not find life, Miller said.
Miller 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.

Sauce: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47031923.../#.T4et6atYsrW

[MixMastahTee]

Here's the abstract of the paper for the lazy.

The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the three which were components of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars. Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response. In this experiment 14C radiolabeled nutrient was added to the Mars soil samples. Active soils exhibited rapid, substantial gas release. The gas was probably CO2 and, possibly, other radiocarbon-containing gases. We have applied complexity analysis to the Viking LR data. Measures of mathematical complexity permit deep analysis of data structure along continua including signal vs. noise, entropy vs.negentropy, periodicity vs. aperiodicity, order vs. disorder etc. We have employed seven complexity variables, all derived from LR data, to show that Viking LR active responses can be distinguished from controls via cluster analysis and other multivariate techniques. Furthermore, Martian LR active response data cluster with known biological time series while the control data cluster with purely physical measures. We conclude that the complexity pattern seen in active experiments strongly suggests biology while the different pattern in the control responses is more likely to be non-biological. Control responses that exhibit relatively low initial order rapidly devolve into near-random noise, while the active experiments exhibit higher initial order which decays only slowly. This suggests a robust biological response. These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.

And here is the pdf to the entire paper.

As I'm not that smart, and certainly no 'astrobiologist', I'll remain skeptical until this garners further attention and scrutiny.

Would be rad if it were true, though.

[Mi-CroMartie]

:p

[Sans Agendum]

I read a headline that said "Viking Robots find life on Mars in 1973, scientists say" and all I could think of was Norwegian cyborgs settling on a planet they could finally call their own while listening to 70's dance tunes. It really warmed my heart.

[filthytothecore]

It would be cool if there is life out here that way maybe we could uberstand other things in our solar system, and yeh I imagined viking robots on the mars that was a awesome visual.

[The Empirical Guy]

Yeah, I imagined robots with horned helmets in longships too.

[Dv5]

[AssetReign]

He can do no wrong.