It might also boast signs of organic carbon, thought to be one of the building blocks of life.
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When the rover drilled a sample from it and heated it up in its onboard lab, it found traces of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur the building blocks of life.
What makes this tale of amateur astral chemistry even more amazing is that cyanomethanimine is believed to be a precursor to RNA -- one of the building blocks of life on Earth.
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Kepler is searching for Earth-like planets around far-flung stars, and the Mars Science Laboratory will sample the Red Planet's geology looking for the building blocks of life - though it will not explicitly look for life itself.
If some of the basic building blocks of life could be replaced with other elements, that would dramatically expand the types of environments on other planets that might support life.
His Nobel Prize winning work on protein structure is more relevant now than ever as we turn attention to the smallest building blocks of life to make sense of the human genome and mechanisms of disease.
Chlorophyll concentrations are vitally important because chlorophyll forms the building blocks of marine life.
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Recycling the once living and organic material through their systems and outputting the basic building blocks of life (nitrogen, phosphorous, minerals, etc).
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Despite the excitement over achieving one of the mission's main goals, it has yet to find complex organic molecules considered the chemical building blocks of life.
Proteins are complicated chemicals made of long chains of amino acids, the tiny chemical building blocks of life.
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Astrobiologists like the idea that life can be built with a completely different set of chemical building blocks because it means that life could then exist in all sorts of places that Earth-based living things would find intolerable.
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That project will seek to return samples of organic materials from an asteroid to help scientists understand how the building blocks for life may have been seeded on the early Earth.
And every option has to be ruled out before the researchers will acknowledge that these vital chemical building-blocks might be "indigenous" or home grown and therefore open a door to the possibility of life on Mars.
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