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Methane on Mars: life or just gas?

From The Daily Beast:

Methane is a familiar chemical, whether you know it by that name or not. It’s the major component of natural gas, which heats my house and possibly yours too. Methane is also a large part of human gas, which means I could start this article with a fart joke if I really wanted to. (However, it’s not the smelly part, which is provided by sulfur compounds.) Lakes on Titan are full of methane, and the chemical is a major component of the giant planets Jupiter, Neptune, and so forth.

Mars is a different case, and an interesting one: it doesn’t have a lot of methane in its atmosphere at any given moment. However, several probes—most recently the Curiosity rover—have measured methane in the Martian atmosphere. Methane on Mars could possibly reveal that the planet is more active geologically than it seems, or even that it harbors microscopic life. [Read more at The Daily Beast….]