Posted by tourdemars to Life on Mars at May 5, 2004 11:37 AM

When scientists announced that they had found evidence of past life in a meteorite from Mars in 1996, it set off a controversy that has been going back and forth even now. The latest research, published in the journal American Mineralogist casts doubt that it's life that was in the space rock. The original discoverers believed that magnetite in the rock was formed by bacteria, but this new paper shows that it can also be caused by an inorganic process, which can be duplicated in the laboratory when iron-bearing carbonates decompose under high heat (such as atmospheric reentry).