A team of scientists from LSU, NASA, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and other research organizations has discovered an area of Earth that is shockingly similar to the surface of Mars. This joint research effort has discovered clues from one of Earth’s driest deserts about the limits of life on this planet, and why past missions to Mars may have failed to detect life. The results of the group’s study were published this week in Science magazine, in an article titled “Mars-like Soils in the Atacama Desert, Chile, and the Dry Limit of Microbial Life.”