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."

Comments

Daddypants, help me!

[E1ven]

I e-mailed you, and CC'd michael, but still this story is posted. I'm trying to be a good subscriber, and point out dupes, but I don't know what else I'm supposed to do.

I want to help Slashdot avoid dupes (esp. obvious ones like this), but it seems like the system fails.