Life on Mars? Maybe

Josh Voorhees has a Slate article via the Washington Post and The New York Times about life on Mars:

(WP): NASA’s steady reconnaissance of Mars with the Curiosity rover has produced another major discovery: evidence of an ancient lake with water that could plausibly be described as drinkable, and which was part of a long-standing, wet environment that could have supported simple forms of life. Scientists have known that the young Mars was more Earth-like than the desert planet we see today, but this is the best evidence yet that Mars had swimming holes that stuck around for thousands or perhaps millions of years. ...Scientists had announced this year that they’d found signs of an ancient, fresh-water lake within Gale Crater, but the new reports provide a much more detailed analysis, including the first scientific measurements of the age of rocks on another planet.
(NYT): Whether any life ever appeared on Mars is not yet known, and Curiosity was not designed to answer that question. But the data coming back from the planet indicate that the possibility of life, at least in the ancient past, is at least plausible. John P. Grotzinger, a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology who is the project scientist for the Curiosity mission, said that if certain microbes like those on present-day Earth had plopped into that ancient Martian lake, they would most likely have found a pleasant place to call home. ...But that location would have been an extremely challenging environment for life to take hold: very salty and highly acidic. Later, the scientists said the soils had been soaked not so much by water as by sulfuric acid. ...What has not been found yet is solid evidence for the carbon molecules known as organics that could serve as the building blocks of life. Such molecules are not always preserved in stone and are destroyed by radiation.

Rico says we're still waiting for the photos of something moving...