New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows that NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week. Further, NASA doesn't need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News. The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope - watch the bacteria move," Miller said. Researchers distilled the Viking Labeled Release data, provided as hard copies by the original researchers, into sets of numbers and analyzed the results for complexity. Since living systems are more complicated than non-biological processes, the idea was to look at the experiment results from a purely numerical perspective. They found close correlations between the Viking experiment results' complexity and those of terrestrial biological data sets. They say the high degree of order is more characteristic of biological, rather than purely physical, processes. "On the basis of what we've done so far, I'd say I'm 99 percent sure there's life there," he added. While not iron-clad, the findings are an additional plank of evidence challenging the popular contention that Viking did not find life, Miller said.
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