NASA-funded researchers are refining a tool that could not only check for the faintest traces of life's molecular building blocks on Mars, but could also determine whether they have been produced by anything alive.

The European Space Agency (ESA), with its ExoMars mission, will deliver the first comprehensive life-detection science package since Viking to the martian surface.

By JOEL ACHENBACH Scientists test turbid waters in debate over origin of life In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. And He said: Let there be Chemistry. And He looked upon the Chemistry and He saw that it was good. And then He said: Wait, we need more carbon. Also more water.

Using primitive meteorites called chondrites as their models, earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have performed outgassing calculations and shown that the early Earth's atmosphere was a reducing one, chock full of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor.

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies are reporting a possible answer to a longstanding question in research on the origins of life on Earth -- how did the first amino acids form the first peptides?