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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Jennifer Glass (Photo by Maureen Rouhi)Researchers appear to have identified a 12-mile (20 kilometer) wide salty lake underneath a massive glacier on Mars. Their research, published Wednesday in the journal Science, opens up the possibility that microbial life may live in this liquid place on Mars. Mars is rich in perchlorate, a salt often used in propellants on Earth. But some microbes thrive on it, just as Earth's marine microbes thrive on carbon dioxide. "People might think that’s nasty stuff," said Jennifer Glass, an astrobiologist at Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who wasn't involved in the research. "That's not true. Microbes can breathe perchlorate — a lot of life can breathe perchlorate."
