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File Compression To Detect Life?
Tech writes "Until a few years ago, whenever geobiologists found an ancient rock looked like a fossilized stromatolite, they figured it was a stromatolite, a layered structure built by colonies of microorganisms. But in 1996 it was shown that stromatolite-like structures could be formed through a simple chemical process. So how does one separate the wheat from the chaff, the true stromatolites from the fakes? Frank Corsetti and Michael Storrie-Lombardi think they may have found a way. Their approach is simplicity itself: Create a digital image of the rock; then compress the image file. The more the file shrinks, the more likely it is that life was responsible for building the layers."
There should be on articles in the "Mysterious Future" the option for subscribers to mark it as a duplicate, avoiding this type of thing. Just a button / link somewhere in the blurb on the front page.
Just my 2 cents