These Spidery 'Veins' On Mars Are Just Plain Weird (Photo)

Nobody knows yet whether or not Mars has ever hosted life, but the Red Planet itself looks strangely alive in a newly released NASA photo. Slender, branching troughs snake across a pinkish, pitted swathe of the southern hemisphere of Mars in the image, creating an impression (at least to this observer) of blood vessels forking through flesh. The photo was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on Feb. 4 2009, but th