If you heard that NASA's Mars rover Curiosity just spotted signs of life on the Red Planet—well, don't get your hopes up.
The odd tubular structures that Curiosity has been investigating lately were probably formed by crystal growth, not tiny burrowing creatures, mission team members said.
"When we looked at these things close up, they're linear, but they're not tubular in the sense of being cylinders; they're actually quite angular," said Curiosity mission scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. [The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)]
"They have kind of a square or a parallelogram sort of cross section and form at angles to each other when there's multiple of them together," he told Space.com. "And all of that's pretty reminiscent of crystalline growth."
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