Spherix Incorporated (NASDAQ/SPEX), today reported that recent data on the Martian surface sent by the Odyssey spacecraft will be interpreted as evidence for liquid water, life’s most essential need, in a paper to be presented at the Astrobiology session of the SPIE (International Society for Optical Engineering) meeting in San Diego on August 4. This is the latest, perhaps most compelling, round in the years’-long fight of the paper’s author, Dr. Gilbert V. Levin, a life detection scientist in NASA’s 1976 Viking Mission to Mars, to gain support for his conclusion that his experiment had succeeded in detecting microbial life. In his analysis of the data from Odyssey’s Neutron Spectrometer, Levin says that the vast quantities of ice it found close to the surface of Mars mean that life-sustaining liquid water was in the soil sampled by his Viking experiment.