Coral on Mars
Quote:NASA's Curiosity rover has snapped black and white images of a rock on the Martian surface that looks remarkably like a piece of coral.
The strange object is in fact a small, light-colored, wind-eroded rock, which the rover found inside the Red Planet's Gale Crater on July 24 — but it looks remarkably similar to the reef-building creatures found in Earth's oceans.
A black and white picture taken with Curiosity's Remote Micro Imager — a high-resolution, telescopic camera that is mounted on the rover — and shared by NASA in a statement on Aug. 4 shows the approximately 1-inch-wide (2.5 centimeters) rock with its intricate branches.
"Curiosity has found many rocks like this one, which were formed by ancient water combined with billions of years of sandblasting by the wind," NASA representatives wrote in the statement.
Coral-shaped rocks on Mars started forming billions of years ago, when the Red Planet still had water, according to the statement. Just like water on Earth, this water was full of dissolved minerals. It percolated through small cracks in Martian rocks, gradually depositing minerals and forming solid "veins" inside the rocks.
These veins form the strange branches of the coral-shaped object that we see in Curiosity's picture today, after millions of years of erosion by sand-laden winds wore away the rock.
https://www.livescience.com/space/mars/n...al-on-mars
![[Image: Coral.webp]](https://i.postimg.cc/jSGr3Sp0/Coral.webp)
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
