Astrophysicist Frank Shu of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has advanced that idea to explain these inclusions and other minerals in meteorites (Science, 20 June 1997, p. 1789).
It would also raise doubts about the judgment of Schopf, the man chosen by NASA to set the standard for distinguishing signs of life from nonlife at the press conference unveiling martian meteorite ALH84001 (Science, 16 August 1996 p. 864).
10 P.M. (Science) METEORITE MEN Steve and Geoff, two men who search for meteorites for a living, travel the Arizona desert to find an area they believe holds promise.
Just 61 out of the 41,000 meteorites known to science come from Mars.
For one thing, the scientists say in a paper in the journal Science, the meteorite's chemical composition -- it is enriched with potassium, phosphorous and rare earth elements -- means that it could have come only from the Imbrium basin, a large area on the Moon's near side.
From across the Rutgers campus I could locate the museum by triangulating the paths of the many people heading for the building; museum directors will tell you that, among science displays, meteorites are close in popularity to dinosaurs.
"Researchers have seen bacteria happily growing inside them," notes Pizzarello, who co-authored the first paper on the preponderance of lefty amino acids in meteorites in 1997 in Science.
Restrained, but that was much the way the huge hullabaloo over signs of life in a martian meteorite got started in 1996 (Science, 16 August 1996, p. 924).
The researchers' carefully worked out chemical and mineralogical evidence of signs of past life in the same meteorite, which they published in Science, drew more careful attention from other scientists, but ultimately these suggestions of life also failed to pan out.
In other words, the team reports this week in Science, the 4.565-billion-year-old 4.565-billion-year-old 4.565-billion-year-old 4.565-billion-year-oldot enough to produce central, meteoritestallic conce.
