NASA's New 'Star Trek' Tech Is Designed to Detect Alien Life

New NASA technology straight out of "Star Trek" could help scientists detect life on other worlds. The laptop, currently in development at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, is a chemical analyzer made to detect both amino acids and fatty acids, often called "the building blocks of life," in samples from extraterrestrial terrain. Amino acids bind together to create proteins, which are vital to almost all processes that occur within a cell, and fatty acids are an impo