It is no lie that some people believe in extraterrestrial life in the solar system or in other galaxies. And with the onslaught of information, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been releasing lately on Earth's neighboring planets, it couldn't be far from impossible.
A group of scientists working with NASA has now created a laptop that is able to detect any signs of biological life on samples from other cosmic bodies.
The laptop, which they dubbed as "Chemical Laptop" has the ability to distinguish certain amino or fatty acids on objects.
Amino and fatty acids are organic compounds that can be a signature of life and through this the chemical laptop will be able to tell whether there is a certain life form or not.
The laptop is designed to run a liquid sample, mix it with a dye that will adhere to the organic compounds and then can be picked out through laser detection.
The chemical laptop is reminiscent of Star Trek's "tricorder" which could detect alien life forms in the series.
"Our device is a chemical analyzer that can be reprogrammed like a laptop to perform different functions," Fernanda Mora, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory technologist helping to develop the tool, said in a statement.
Although the process of detecting organic materials seems so easy, especially with a chemical laptop that is designed to detect it, organic materials are more complex.
Some organic materials are naturally occurring, without any spark of life at all, which means that if the chemical laptop detects organic materials it doesn't mean it is an alien lifeform.
But the scientists have been able to go around the hiccup. They designed chemical laptop to detect "left-handed" amino acids.
There are two types of amino acids, right-handed and left-handed, most amino acids on Earth are left-handed, so if chemical laptop detects an absurdly excess "left-handed" or "right-handed" amino acid then that's a gold hit.
If it is a 50-50 mix between the two amino acids, the scientist can conclude that the amino acid was not of biological origin.
