There's life on Mars! Maybe. Again. What's going on?
Nasa has announced that the Curiosity rover has detected spikes in methane concentration in the atmosphere within the Gale Crater. Over the last 20 months Curiosity has sampled the chemical makeup of the air around it a dozen times, finding that normally there are seven methane molecules per ten billion other air molecules (which on Mars is about 96 per cent carbon dioxide) - except on two occasions, where it jumped to ten times that. That's a big deal because methane doesn't just linger around; it's produced by some chemical process and then dissipates relatively quickly, so whatever's producing it must be doing it recurrently and frequently.
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