World's oldest fossils discovered

Pre Oxygen Sulphur life !
Now think about that and look at all the Planets and exoplanets there are in the Universe and honestly say there is no life in it other than on Earth.

TG Daily
Scientists say they've found the world's oldest fossils, the remains of tiny creatures that lived 3.4 billion years ago in a pre-oxygen world.

‘At last we have good solid evidence for life over 3.4 billion years ago. It confirms there were bacteria at this time, living without oxygen,’ says Professor Martin Brasier of the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford.

The Earth was hotter than today, and dominated by volcanic activity. The oceans were as warm as a bath, and circulating currents were very strong. Land masses were small and the tidal range was huge.

And without plants or algae to photosynthesise and produce oxygen, very little oxygen was present. The early life appears to have been based on sulphur rather than oxygen for energy and growth.

"Such bacteria are still common today. Sulphur bacteria are found in smelly ditches, soil, hot springs, hydrothermal vents – anywhere where there’s little free oxygen and they can live off organic matter,’ says Brasier.

The microfossils were found in a remote part of Western Australia called Strelley Pool - the remains of the oldest beach or shoreline known on Earth - in some of the oldest sedimentary rocks that can be found anywhere.

Salty water may flow on Mars

Water on Mars? Why not, their is water here and water in space.

Water = Life.



The Los Angeles Times

Salty water may flow on Mars in the form of strange, dark lines on the terrain that grow and fade with the seasons, according to recent images. The findings, reported in the journal Science, provide a new line of evidence that life could exist on the Red Planet.

The findings, released Thursday, describe images taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, currently circling the planet. The otherwise unremarkable lines on the planet's slopes grow more prominent during the warm season, proliferating from late Martian spring into early fall. This suggests they were made by volatile chemicals that can boil at relatively low temperatures, such as water and carbon dioxide, the authors wrote.

They look rather like flow lines that would be left by running water, ending in light-colored patches that could be material deposited by the flow, the authors added.

Building blocks of life are found on asteroid

A two for one special ,

First there is a good possibility of life on Mars,

And We also have very good evidence to the possibility of life on an asteroid

We are all Descendants Of Space Pond Scum !


The Los Angeles Times
For the first time, scientists have discovered evidence of water ice, as well as organic compounds, on an asteroid -- findings that bolster a leading theory for the origins of life on Earth.

"Up until now there was no sign that asteroids had any abundant organics or ice on them," said Joshua P. Emery, a planetary astronomer at the University of Tennessee and an author of one of two studies on the discoveries. The new evidence supports the possibility that the essential building blocks of life came from asteroids.

The research, reported by two teams of scientists working independently, appeared online Wednesday in the journal Nature. Both teams' conclusions are based on analyses of infrared light reflected by 24 Themis, one of the largest asteroids in the solar system.

Because different materials absorb light at different wavelengths, scientists were able to establish the content of the asteroid by analyzing the light reflected by it. The asteroid contains water and organic compounds, or molecules containing carbon, the teams concluded. With water, such molecules are the building blocks for producing and sustaining living things.

Building block of life found on comet

Another Piece of the Puzzle To life outside our Planet Has been found !
It was an Amazing feat , that the microscopic particles were even Captured in the First place !
But now we have a little more evidence that life Exists elsewhere !

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday.

Microscopic traces of glycine were discovered in a sample of particles retrieved from the tail of comet Wild 2 by the NASA spacecraft Stardust deep in the solar system some 242 million miles (390 million km) from Earth, in January 2004.

Samples of gas and dust collected on a small dish lined with a super-fluffy material called aerogel were returned to Earth two years later in a canister that detached from the spacecraft and landed by parachute in the Utah desert.

Comets like Wild 2, named for astronomer Paul Wild (pronounced Vild), are believed to contain well-preserved grains of material dating from the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago, and thus clues to the formation of the sun and planets.

The initial detection of glycine, the most common of 20 amino acids in proteins on Earth, was reported last year, but it took time for scientists to confirm that the compound in question was extraterrestrial in origin.

"We couldn't be sure it wasn't from the manufacturing or the handling of the spacecraft," said astrobiologist Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the principal author of the latest research.

....