Unable to give up on life on Mars, bio-boffins now thrilled to find boron Boron, a relatively rare chemical element, has been detected on Mars for the first time. It's a sign there may have been life on the Red Planet. A paper published in the Geophysical Research Letters on Tuesday links the presence of boron to the possible presence of ribonucleic acid on the unforgiving dust world at one time or …
Obscure!? Sigh ... kids these days
That said I'm mildly confused by this. There's no reason boron won't be found in Mar's surface, and it's no big surprise that any boron on Mars will be in the form of borates given the highly oxidised state of the surface - on Earth (almost?) all boron containing minerals are borates. So given that why the big fuss about life? For me the most amazing thing is that the truly amazing Curiosity rover can detect a rare element like boron - I wonder what the concentration is?
If you want obscure, how about H G Wells' original, before Jeff fiddled with it?
“The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one,” he said.
Or,
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. "
Presence of B <> presence of RNA
So Boron, necessary , but not sufficient to demonstrate RNA on Mars.
TBH it's a low atomic number element, so I'm not too surprised that if analyzed enough Martian regolith you'd find some there. Y'know, planets are all made of stars, and Boron is early in the fusion list?
Given there's plenty of Iron on the surface I'd say anything below Iron was an odds on bet to existing there.
Still. Handy for ticking off a list of elements you'd want if you were setting up home there. IIRC Boron is quite useful for making alloys in electric motors, generators and transformers. If you want to create a self sufficient settlement being able to make these is going to be quite important.
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