Could we have evidence of life on Mars?

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Hello lovely curious-minded listeners.

Welcome to the Inside Science podcast presented by me, Victoria Gill, and first broadcast on the 11th of September 2025.

Today, on the anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, two columns of light will be beamed into the sky from Manhattan.

I will be speaking to one scientist who will be at the event on an all-night bird-watching vigil.

And we're finding out how a change in one part of our brain can fundamentally alter who we are.

I'm also joined by the excellent Penny Sachet, managing editor at New Scientist, who has been combing through a plethora of scientific publications to bring us the discoveries we need to know about.

Hello, Penny, how are you?

I'm very well, thank you.

It's good to have you back on Inside Science.

What have you got for us this week?

Well, I think my favourite story has to be our hunter-gatherer ancestor hairstyles.

I am very intrigued.

Much more on that later, so stick with us, Penny.

But first though, could we finally have evidence of life on Mars?

You might have read the news and heard the fanfare because it's just been revealed that rocks picked up by NASA's Perseverance rover appear to contain chemical signatures, dots of minerals that could have been left there by living organisms.

The search for life on the red planet has captured our imaginations for decades, and this isn't the first tantalizing clue about its existence.

So what makes this latest discovery different?

Well Jonathan Amos, former BBC science correspondent, is here to help me answer that.

Hello, John.

Hey Vic, Mars, you've got my favourite subject.

Johnny Mars.

He's found.

Johnny Mars.

Before we come to this latest discovery, can you take me back to the beginning?

When did scientists start looking for or spotting signals of life on Mars?

Why was it deemed to be a possibility?

Well, you probably start with the Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, 1888 I think it was.

Through his telescope he thought he could see a canali, canals on the surface of Mars.

That was demolished comprehensively by NASA's Mariner 4 spacecraft in 1965.

It flew past Mars and could only see a sort of cold desiccated world battered by big craters.

But if you come forward to the Viking landers in 1976, they had experiments to look for life on the red planet.

They tried to stimulate metabolism in the soil underneath the lanterns, and they got some quite positive results from those experiments.

Deeply controversial.

There was a big pushback.

People said, well, show me that this cannot be created by geology.

Why is biology the only explanation?

It's really hard.

You're trying to prove negative.

And that's, I guess, is where the Viking results ended up, which was acknowledged by Norman Horowitz, who was one of the principal investigators on that mission in a talk in 1977.

The reigning hypothesis at the moment requires one to consider that the results obtained by the biological experiments were in fact not signals

of biology, but were the results of peculiar chemical processes occurring in the Martian surface material.

You know, it sounds like a familiar headline to me, signs of possible life on Mars.

What have been the big clues through those decades?

Probably that the big event was in 1996, and this was the Allen Hills meteorite.

So this is not evidence on Mars itself.

It's a rock that fell to Earth, but we know came from Mars.

And when the NASA scientists looked at the Allen Hills meteorite, they found what looked like these tiny little micro-fossils, little worm-like creatures.

And then they looked at the chemistry around those supposed fossils, you know, magnetite crystals, organic molecules, carbonate globules.

And they came to this hypothesis that this also was evidence of life.

And this was a big hullabaloo at the time.

President Clinton, he was in the White House at that time and he walked out onto the south lawn and he gave a pretty remarkable press conference.

This is the product of years of exploration.

and months of intensive study by some of the world's most distinguished scientists.

Like all discoveries, discoveries, this one will and should continue to be reviewed, examined, and scrutinized.

I am determined that the American space program will put its full intellectual power and technological prowess behind the search for further evidence of life on Mars.

There was pushback.

Can I explain all of those features with geology?

Simple geological process, no biology involved at all.

And I think that's probably where the scientific community eventually arrived, the consensus that Allen Hills does not have proof of life on Mars.

Isn't there an interesting political tone to that, the determination that there will be time and resources and scientific effort into the search for life on Mars, especially given the political environment now?

Let's just fast forward to September 2025.

NASA is calling what's in these rocks potential biosignatures.

What does that mean?

What do you think?

Do we finally have the evidence for life on Mars?

So this is a fine-grained rock that Perseverance has found on the surface of Mars.

It's called Cheava Falls.

Sheava Falls is the tallest waterfall in the Grand Canyon.

They give these things names from Earth.

Interesting geology.

It's a rusty red-coloured rock, but it's got these interesting dark green, dark blue, black-coloured speckles that they've nicknamed poppy seeds and leopard spots.

What they're suggesting is that this is evidence for chemical reactions that took place in a muddy lake bed three and a half billion years ago.

Chemical reactions between the mud itself and organic matter.

And these ingredients reacted to form new minerals and those poppy seeds and leopard spots.

And on Earth, these are processes that are mediated by bacteria, by life.

You can see these structures, this chemistry on Earth today.

Essentially, microbes are eating the organic matter to derive energy and make new minerals as a result.

Now, they have been tremendously cautious here.

They're not saying we have found life.

They are saying we have found a potential biosignature worthy of further investigation.

And to come back to that, you know, prove the negative, you can bet now that in labs around the world, they will be trying to make these chemical reactions to make these structures in ways that do not involve biology at all.

And they may be able to do it.

And in which case, this will just go back into that list of we nearly found life on Mars.

To rule that biosignature out.

So we don't know for sure.

How will we know?

This has all been done at a distance by the instrumentation that's aboard that Perseverance rover.

Yeah.

So we need to get these rocks back to Earth.

You need to get them back.

You know, we're doing remote sensing 200 million miles away.

As amazing as Perseverance is, it's nothing compared to the analytical tools that we have here on Earth.

That has been been the plan, but now the Trump White House has some pretty significant budget cuts planned for NASA.

Does that mean that NASA won't have the opportunity to get these rocks back to Earth?

Well, Perseverance continues to search for interesting rocks and caches them in its belly, makes little collections in its belly.

But you're right, NASA has essentially scrapped Mars sample return.

The current thinking, the architecture that they devised, they came to the conclusion it would cost $11 billion, it would take till 2040 to bring the samples back.

So they said, we can't do that.

And then the Trump administration now has proposed a budget for next year, for 2026, that essentially wipes out Mars sample return completely from the budget line.

And it's difficult to see in the current climate how we will get Cheava Falls back to Earth anytime soon.

Jonathan Amos, thank you very much for taking us through that fascinating potted history of the search for life on Mars.

You are listening to Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

Tonight, at dusk, a team of researchers and volunteers will gather to hold an all-night vigil, gazing skywards as two bright columns of light are beamed into the night sky over downtown Manhattan in New York.

I grew up in the area and had moved away to go to school and the beginning of grad school and literally finished moving in on September 10th and was just sort of like getting things

organized and about to go to work for almost the first time on September 11th.

And so, yeah, I was here.

We lived uptown at the time, but we saw what was happening as it was happening from our rooftop.

And so, yeah, we were in the city.

That was Dr.

Andrew Farnsworth from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in the US.

Every year on the anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the Tribute in Light memorial is lit in honor of the people who lost their lives.

But these beams of light also draw the attention of flocks of birds that are migrating along the Atlantic coast.

And that's something that's led to a subtle but significant change in this annual commemorative event.

Here's Andrew again.

Being interested in migration, there are certain things you learn very quickly about how birds migrate.

Most of the migration happens at night.

And because of that, light is a huge factor that determines how birds behave at night.

It attracts birds, it disorients them.

And so every time when I'm thinking about migration, I'm always thinking about light.

Why is light potentially an issue for those birds?

What is happening that is disruptive or could change that migratory behavior?

There's attraction and there's disorientation.

So the attraction, if we think about moths to a flame, literally, or looking on your porch light and seeing insects, birds do that too.

And so there's a deep evolutionary history of this kind of relationship with attraction or repulsion from light in dark situations, right?

That's that it goes way back on the evolutionary tree.

So the attraction part relates to that.

The disorientation part relates to this really interesting feature of birds, let's call it their sensory ecology, how they perceive the world.

Birds can perceive the magnetic field of the planet and orient and navigate with that.

Light, electromagnetic radiation in that frequency range, as wavelengths and so on, on, that interacts with the tools that birds have, these special abilities.

It's actually, we think it's a molecule in the eye.

Right.

So they're moving towards the light, and then, and the light directly can disrupt the way in which they orient themselves as they're moving.

So then what do you see as you look into these huge bright columns of light on the 11th of September?

What do you see in terms of bird behavior?

If you think about a snow globe that you might see at the holiday times, and if you shake it up and there are all of the little particles floating around that bulb and sort of swirling around, that's very much what it looks like in the lights when there are large numbers of birds.

And it may be that you see this from everywhere at building height, you know, from 20 or 30 stories above the ground.

all the way up to the limit of vision in binoculars.

So it's happening over the course of multiple vertical kilometers.

It's really quite a striking and almost unbelievable visual of at times tens of thousands of birds.

What have you been able to discover?

What science have you been able to do by having this team of people that are watching these beams and studying the bird behavior?

From using radar to track birds that were moving in the lights, also the visual observations and some other monitoring we were doing that showed so clearly when the lights were on, the numbers of birds increased dramatically by an order of magnitude or more.

The speeds of migration slowed down because birds were circling.

And that when you turned the lights off, that the numbers declined almost immediately.

Birds moved away from the beams.

They sped up their migration.

They stopped circling.

That was a super striking piece of science that then we could take and okay, the science for the science's sake is wonderful.

It's good to know that.

Helps us understand how birds relate to light when migrating at night.

But even better, you could then take the science and apply it in a particular way to say, okay, we have an action here.

When you turn off the lights, it's actually safeguarding these birds that are migrating at night.

What happens now with the tribute?

When the tribute happens, there are observers on the ground at the base of the beams that are basically just looking up all night with the producers and organizers and the techs that are operating everything.

And they are watching what's happening when birds are in the beams.

About 30 or 45 minutes after sunset, the first birds often start to appear and some bats and lots of insects.

When the observers are looking up those beams, if they start to see more than a thousand birds concentrated in the beams, and if they start to see birds descending, meaning that that attraction to the light is sort of pulling birds down to the ground into the level where they may hit buildings, If they see a thousand birds or more in the beams and these dangerous behaviors start to happen with birds circling, descending, then there's a discussion with the organizers and producers to say, this is happening.

It's time to turn off the beams.

They will start the process of turning the beams off.

And when I say process, I do mean process.

Every bulb is turned off individually.

It's not like there's a single switch that turns off each of these 88 bulbs.

So it takes time.

And once they're off, they're left off for about 20 minutes.

And after 20 minutes, there are no more birds in the area that are in those dangerous behaviors, right?

So the lights come back on.

If it's a heavy night of migration, very quickly thereafter, we'll start to see the birds do the same thing again and they'll have to shut the lights off again.

But it's not always that way, but sometimes it does work out that the lights are shut off, you know, three, four, five, even up to eight times during the course of the night.

And how important is it to you to be part of keeping this tribute going in a way that is sustainable and protective for the birds migrating over New York City.

The science that we can do there, which obviously is completely secondary to the, you know, the purpose of the event, how we can connect that in the public and educate and then just have this discussion where everybody is winning on both sides and it's positive and it engages just sort of a new respect in each direction.

That's been really important to do.

And also, you know, as a New Yorker and as an American, it was just felt like it was an important opportunity to be able to do that.

It's definitely not been easy, you know, especially early on.

It was a very difficult set of discussions to have.

Even to talk about something other than human life at this kind of situation was sort of like, I'm not even sure I can do this.

This doesn't seem like a good idea, you know.

But once the...

compromise and the communication lines opened up, it was clear that it was a very good idea.

And I think the, to me, the thing that reminds me of that the most is in talking with the families and first responders that come to the memorial to actually, you know, memorialize friends or family or coworkers, to talk to them.

And when they find out, you know, like, wait, why are you here and what are you doing?

And to have them say, oh, we, we understand that, you know, like that helps us understand also what we're seeing up there.

And that, you know, some people make the connection like, you know, maybe that bird is my cousin or my father or my, you know, there's a, there's a connection there, which we're not trying to make, but that some people make on their own, whatever it might be.

They find some comfort in understanding, oh, like.

life is happening and and we can see life here.

And this tribute is a way to kind of bring people together.

Even, oh, thank you for that.

Well, Andrew Farnsworth, thank you very much indeed for talking to us.

It was great to chat to you and I wish you well for a long and important night.

I appreciate that.

Thank you so much, Victoria.

And thank you for the interest in this.

You know, it's

a very, very powerful installation and a powerful experience.

A powerful experience indeed.

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Now, Penny Sache is here with me and you have been pouring over this week's intriguing scientific discoveries, haven't you, Penny?

What has been catching your eye, Do tell?

I have, yeah, so I guess the first one is kind of bad news.

It's a really good look at polar geoengineering and whether that's really an option.

And the idea behind that is that if we can stop them from melting or refreeze them as the climate keeps warming, maybe we can try to reduce just how drastically global sea levels are going to rise.

But now there's been a review of five of the main polar geoengineering ideas and that review has concluded that none of these are likely to work or even be possible in the first place.

And so these ideas include some things that you've covered on the show before, erecting massive curtains to block warm ocean currents from getting into contact with ice sheets, and ideas to go out and draw holes in glaciers to try to pump out water that's underneath them.

And these are incredibly bold ideas.

The conditions in these places are very tough.

The engineering challenges are huge.

This latest study

suggests that none of these methods really passes six key criteria.

And so these included things like: can it be done at the scale to really make a difference or the speed that would be needed?

Already, you know, I'm seeing some researchers are still continuing to argue that they still warrant further investigation.

We can't know this yet.

But one of the scientists behind this review is arguing that it's just a waste of resources and a distraction when we just need to cut our carbon emissions.

When we cover stories about these geoengineering ideas, scaling them up is just from these small trials is almost unimaginably vast of a project.

The scale up is so huge.

It's,

like you say, unimaginably huge, and then in some of the harshest, most dangerous conditions in the world.

So, you know, a big challenge to pull anything like this off.

Can you bring us some good news then?

Yes, well, first, I've got something intriguing, and this is an intubation robot.

This was a study in the journal Science Translational Medicine that caught my eye.

Intubation is this really tricky but important emergency medical procedure.

It's where they insert a breathing tube down into the airway, usually of someone who's really badly injured or suffering cardiac arrest.

And it's so important, you'll be really familiar with it from sort of emergency medical dramas, but it's very fiddly.

It requires lots of skill and training to get it right.

And it can mean that this, you know, really important life-saving procedure can be hard to get done and done well outside of a hospital environment.

So, for example, if it's first responders or paramedics, say, apparently, as many as a third of those first attempts to intubate can fail.

So, to solve all of that, an American team have been trying to develop a soft robot to guide the tube down the airway and boost these success rates.

And I like soft robots because you normally think of hard robots, that's the kind of archetypical robot.

Arms and androids, and

soft robots are just altogether weird.

They're these squishy things and they work by changing shape or expanding.

And they're kind of creepy in their own way, but fascinating.

And this particular robot they designed, it's really cool.

It works a bit like the roots of plants or fungal hyphae.

So it has this squishy, expanding tip that sort of finds its way through the tight, dark spaces of the airway, like growing roots might do underground.

And the initial results are quite promising.

A soft, squishy robot crawling down my throat.

It gives me kind of shades of The Last of Us.

It does sound quite creepy, but very interesting if they can use that to get that right.

And you have one more story for us, don't you, Penny?

I believe you have some fashion science for us now.

Yes, I do.

So, this was this charming little story that New Scientists covered this week, and it's about a carved statuette that might give us a glimpse of what hunter-gatherer hairstyles look like about 27,000 years ago, which is quite amazing.

And so, this is a little figure found in northern France, and the hair on its head is covered with a sort of grid-like pattern.

And so, it's been suggested that might be some kind of a hairnet or possibly intricate braiding.

It looks looks like that to me in my completely inexpert opinion.

The hairstyle is quite long, it goes down the back of the neck and apparently that makes it different from similar finds in Central and Eastern Europe.

So what I love about that is it sort of raises this possibility that maybe there were different hair fashions that varied by time and place.

And I guess I lazily assumed that our ancestors 30,000 years ago probably didn't care very much about their hair, but I guess it makes sense that they did.

They're just like us.

Just seems to be so fundamental to hominin culture.

Yeah, and fashion comes in 30,000-year cycles.

Well, thank you so much, Penny.

Absolute pleasure to have you on the programme.

Do come back.

Oh, thanks for having me.

Now, here on Inside Science, we have been devouring this year's most exciting science books and hearing from the six authors shortlisted for the annual Royal Society Book Prize.

We've also been speaking to each of the six judges who have the difficult task of deciding who wins.

I'm Sandy Knapp.

I'm a botanist from the Natural History Museum.

One of the books on the shortlist is called Our Brains Ourselves and what I love about this book is the subtitle is What a Neurologist's Patients Taught Him About the Brain.

So this is instead of a scientist telling people about how things work, this is a scientist thinking about how other people have taught him something about what he is expert in.

There's a humility to it that I think is very engaging.

It's also an incredibly engaging book.

But I think it's also, he starts out with the feeling of being different and the feeling of not belonging and the feeling of not being part of where he is in Britain.

And I think we've all experienced that to some extent.

And then he goes on to talk about how that some neurological conditions make you feel that as well.

And then comes back at the end to what it is and our sense of self and what being a self is all about.

And I think it's that sounds very philosophical, but actually a lot of science is quite philosophical, really.

The author of Our Brains Ourselves is neuroscientist and clinical neurologist Professor Masood Hussein.

He told me how in each chapter of his book, we meet one of his patients, and every one of those encounters reveals something about how our brains make us who we are.

One good example is Trish in the book, who has developed Alzheimer's disease, but she is in complete denial about the fact there's any problem with her memory.

And

I think for me,

the lesson was that someone could be in denial about a diagnosis because they're scared of the implications of that diagnosis.

And it's something that perhaps doctors don't think enough about, is

when someone says, no, I haven't got that, don't be silly.

We're all having problems with our memory as we get older.

I don't believe I've got Alzheimer's disease.

It doesn't necessarily mean that that's what they think.

There may be an underlying reason why they are in denial about a diagnosis.

You know, she also had this remarkable story that she'd gone on holiday with her poor husband, Steve, and Steve related the story that they'd had a great time, but when it came to leave, she said, it's been fantastic, but I think my husband wouldn't be very happy if you came back home with me.

He struggled to persuade her to let her take him back.

But, you know, she was still saying at times, I wish you two Steves would decide who's staying with me tonight.

You know, so that's a kind of problem that you couldn't foresee happening just because someone's got a problem with their memory.

It can be so bad that they actually have forgotten the person who's their husband.

It strikes me in the book that you have a tremendous patience and empathy that you kind of are able to take a step back and listen and assess, but also be, I think, you know, be very kind in that moment where people might be behaving strangely.

There's a chapter in the book about one of your patients who had a disorder of their frontal lobe, which meant that their behaviour became much more erratic and quite aggressive,

which

must be quite difficult to deal with when you meet that person.

I wonder how important that personal empathy is in your role.

I think to be a good doctor, it's not just about making diagnoses or handing out medications.

You have to understand what the problem is because, okay, I will see them for half an hour, but this is the person who's going home and their family and friends are seeing them all the time.

So you've got to try and understand what it's like when someone's so disinhibited, aggressive, both verbally and sometimes physically,

how to deal with that situation and what would be the best solutions.

Because it's it's not always medications in those sort of situations.

I think if you don't place yourself in that way, empathize with what's going on, you don't really stand a chance of doing anything more than making the diagnosis.

And doctoring for me isn't just about making the diagnosis.

And how did you come to focus on the seven people that have made the chapters of your book?

Yes, so I decided to take important fundamental cognitive processes like

motivation, like what we call episodic memory, what most people would consider memory, memory of events, but also semantic memory, memories of concepts, attention, visual perception, the body schema, and also

how you behave in certain situations, the frontal lobe syndrome.

And I thought these were good examples of things that people could relate to and understand.

But, you know, when people think about identity, they think, oh, that's about personality.

What I wanted to show was that even fundamental cognitive processes, like memory, actually have an impact not only on your personal identity, but also on your social identity.

So I chose relatively fundamental things that people could relate to.

And what has this process of trying to unravel that connection between the brain and the self in this story?

What do you think that's taught you about what the self is?

Yeah, I mean the overarching theme of the book is about how different cognitive processes create the self.

It's not a fictional narrative as someone might have said, you know, some philosophers have said.

For me it's the emergent property of all those cognitive processes that lead to our feeling, our view, our perspective of self.

And the best way perhaps to show that is when you take away one of those processes, like memory or perception or attention, and see what's left with the self both in terms of the personal identity and the social identity.

So it's really telling us that the self is very complicated.

It's not one thing.

It's created by these cognitive modules that we've grown up with.

It develops.

It's not something which is immutable.

And that's also important to this idea about how the self allows you to belong because you can't really talk about the self without others.

Yeah.

What do you hope people take away from this book then?

Because it strikes me that there's more to the story than learning about the brain.

Yes, so at one level, if you're interested in the brain, the book will tell you a lot about the brain.

Stuff that you wouldn't normally see in a popular science book taken to quite a high level I think.

But my hope is that people will see that there's much more to this, that the theme is that these parts of the brain are what creates us.

These are creating the way we are.

And the way we are develops over time.

But if you were to have a brain disorder, you can see that starkly because if you take away one of these processes, you realise that you can change fundamentally.

Really exposes what identity is about.

Thank you to Professor Masood Hussein there.

Well, that is all we have time for this week.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

The producers were Jonathan Blackwell, Dan Welsh, Tim Dodd, and Claire Salisbury.

Technical production was by Rhys Morris and Emma Harth.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

And if you want to test your knowledge of all things space, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and follow the links to the Open University to try the Open University Space quiz.

I will be back with you next week when we'll be exploring the ends of the earth.

So until then, thanks for listening and bye-bye.

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