microbe which is resistant to radiation may have come from Mars, Russian scientists say. The researchers suggest the bug may have begun life on the red planet before being blasted to earth by an asteroid. Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand a thousand times the dose of radiation that would kill a human being. To find out how this resistance was acquired, Anatoli Pavlov and his team from St Petersburg’s Ioffe Physico-Technical decided to blast another microbe, E.coli, with gamma rays, according to New Scientist magazine