I couldn't not blog about this

So, New Scientist, your source for amazing revolutionary discoveries in science whether they are true or not, ran a story about the discovery of liquid puddles on Mars that immediately rang alarm bells in my head.

The person making the claim was Ron Levin, son of Gilbert Levin, a scientist with the 1970s Viking lander project who's long claimed that his experiment detected life on Mars. Who knows—maybe it did. But both of the Levins have also claimed for a long time that the color balance of every picture from the surface of Mars is way off, and the planet actually has a blue sky and green vegetation-like patches on the rocks—a claim that had a germ of truth to it, in that the Viking pictures often did have bad color balance (Mars does not have a Pepto-Bismol-colored sky), but this can't reasonably be said of the Pathfinder or rover photos. So I'd been inclined to wait for independent corroboration for this latest claim.

Anyway, now it turns out that the "puddles" are on the slope of a crater wall.