Not finding life? Dig deeper.
A place so barren that NASA uses it as a model for the Martian environment, Chile’s Atacama desert gets rain maybe once a decade. In 2003, scientists reported that the driest Atacama soils were sterile.
Not so, reports a team of Arizona scientists. Bleak though it may be, microbial life lurks beneath the arid surface of the Atacama’s absolute desert. "We found life, we can culture it, and we can extract and look at its DNA," said Raina Maier, a professor of soil, water and environmental science at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The work from her team contradicts last year’s widely reported study that asserted the "Mars-like soils" of the Atacama’s core were the equivalent of the "dry limit of microbial life."
Ex-pollies to look out for ET
Philosophers and former politicians will soon join an elite group of scientists whose job it is to work out how to respond to signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Professor Paul Davies, of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, who heads the group, says a call from ET would raise profound issues that require consideration from more than "a bunch of gung ho scientists".
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