Charting femtosecond energy flow could aid redesign of molecules to improve light capture.

A detector designed to search for signs of life on Mars may prove useful closer to home. It turns out the device also excels at identifying the components of red wine and other foods and beverages that can cause headaches, or in extreme cases, even lead to strokes.

Chosen to fly in 2011 as part of the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission, an instrument designed at UC Berkeley will look for an indisputable signature of life: the tendency of life-based amino acids to be either left- or right-handed. The instrument, the Mars Organic Analyzer, passed a key test this month in the most lifeless region of our planet, Chile's Atacama Desert.

Berkeley biophysicist, Richard Mathies, talked with Astrobiology Magazine about plans for a 2009 experiment to test for martian biology.Astrobiology Magazine -- Imagine having a modern biology lab on another planet. Then imagine putting that lab on a tiny silicon chip.

Berkeley -- The same cutting-edge technology that speeded sequencing of the human genome could, by the end of the decade, tell us once and for all whether life ever existed on Mars, according to a University of California, Berkeley, chemist.Richard Mathies, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and developer of the first capillary electrophoresis arrays and new energy transfer fluorescent dye labels - both used in today's DNA sequencers - is at work on an instrument that would use these technologies to probe Mars dust for evidence of life-based amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.With two development grants from NASA totaling nearly $2.4 million, he and team members from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology and UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography hope to build a Mars Organic Analyzer to fly aboard NASA's roving, robotic Mars Science Laboratory mission and/or the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission, both scheduled for lau