One of the first probes that was ever sent to Mars was equipped with a cornucopia of cutting edge science based things. There were several instruments on the device designed to detect if there was life on the probably dead planet. It came as a surprise to most people when the first process came back with the result of, “yeah, this is totally life” and was quickly debunked when the rest of the tests managed to show nothing like that. Throughout the years people have just forgotten about this event; that is until recently.
Enter the University of Southern California and their determination that this needed to be studied further. Before it had been simply written off as an anomaly of testing and that the soil of Mars didn’t really contain any life at all, so a neurobiologist decided to run the same series of events on life found on Earth. Not only did several of the life forms tested show the same exact results (including one less than microbe sized lab rat), but in the same way that everything unfolded on the surface of Mars. While not the awesome evidence proving that life will exist if given even a small chance, it still pretty much shows that there probably is life on Mars—sadly just not in the way that people will let you win an argument with.
Source: Popular Science: Australia