Ice Packs and Methane on Mars Suggest Present Life Possible, European Team Says.

[ 22 February 2005: Message edited by: Albireo ]

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A newly discovered life form that froze on Earth some 30,000 years ago was apparently alive all that time and started swimming as soon as it thawed, a NASA scientist reported on Wednesday, in a finding he said has implications for possible contemporary life on Mars.

The organism -- a bacterium dubbed Carnobacterium pleistocenium -- probably flourished in the Pleistocene Age, along with woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers, said Richard Hoover of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
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The discovery of the living bacteria in Alaska's permafrost raises another possibility, Hoover said.

"The other thing that's exciting: Just like we found in the Fox tunnel of Alaska, frozen biology in the form of unicellular bacteria might even have remained alive, frozen in the Martian sea," he said.

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[ 24 February 2005: Message edited by: Albireo ]