Parched Presence.

• Autores: Charles Q. Choi
• Localización: Scientific American, ISSN 0036-8733, Vol. 292, Nº. 2, 2005, págs. 32-32
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The article looks at life in the extreme conditions of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. The barren, Mars-like heart of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile seemed to presage bad news for discovering life on the Red Planet. Researchers failed to find organisms in the soil, which gets rain maybe once a decade and may be as arid as places on Mars. Now Raina Maier of the University of Arizona and her colleagues have discovered that the soil is not sterile after all. In the November 19, 2004, "Science," they report that, when moistened, samples from areas devoid of plant life for at least a million years yielded bacteria, which may have survived in a state of suspended animation. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Phoenix mission will attempt a similar experiment on Mars in 2008.