Wee Beasties

I will admit to being a bit surprised to see that some people were actually disappointed at the NASA Ames announcement yesterday that basically everything we thought we knew about organic chemistry was only part of the story. But, I get that lots of folk had hyped the possibility that NASA would announce the existence of little green men, and somehow new twists on the periodic table just didn't have the same charm.

So, for those who were hoping for evidence of alien life, stay tuned. I will not be surprised if we see exactly that announcement from NASA, specifically JPL, in the next few weeks. Or very early in 2011. Peer review is a slow and arduous process, but it looks like they may have some very interesting things in the works. Not new data, but new analysis of old data. Meaning, we may have seen our first alien life 14 years ago, correctly identified it as such, and then subsequently misidentified it as something else. Such is science. But it seems that possibly the martian meteorites ALH 84001, Nakhla and others may in fact contain fossilized nanobacteria after all. We'll see.