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A scientist has built a living bacterium from four bottles of chemicals. Biologist Craig Venter took the natural bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium and replaced its genetic structure with DNA they created from the chemicals.

The Daily Mail quotes Venter as saying, "We consider this the second in significant steps of a three-step process in our attempts to make the first synthetic organism. This entire process started with four bottles of chemicals."
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There’s a reason we’ve sent a rover called "Curiosity" up to Mars: Astronomers want to prove the theory that microorganisms on an asteroid from Mars that crashed into the Earth billions of years ago may have started life here. We do know that fragments from distant planets might have been the "sprouts of life" on this one. Mars may now be dead (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show), but we may live on as the progeny of that planet.
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The new Mars rover was named Curiosity because it hopes to answer one of the greatest questions of modern man: Are we really Martians?

A few billion years ago, Mars may have been a planet covered with oceans. We’re not sure what happened (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show), but we do know that the liquid has mostly burned away. Curiosity will probe the soil that they left behind in order to look for tiny fossils.
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