Helix, did you conveniently leave out this part from your quote?
"I don't see any convincing evidence for nannobacteria or DNA [in this study]," Dr John Cisar, of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, US, told BBC News Online.
"If you know you're dealing with a life form, you can use the staining techniques [they used]. But there are false positives in these types of techniques."
Dr Cisar said in research he had conducted, nanoparticles had tested positive with a stain for nucleic acids. But when he and his team tried to extract these nucleic acids, none had been found.
Previous research carried out by Jack Maniloff of the University of Rochester in New York has shown that to contain the DNA and proteins it needs to function, a cell must be a minimum of 140nm across.
There is a very good possibility that these little things are leftovers from the calcification process which has destroyed the cells they originally were. We know that the replication process is not confined to the work of the DNA but that there seems to exist some directions for dividing within the membranes of the cell itself. If this is what is still going on for awhile after the main part of the cell has been victimized by calcification, then that easily explains what was seen.
In the meantime, those 'nannobacteria' 'tracks' in the Mars rocks, aren't.
http://www.meteor.co.nz/mars.html -- a very good technical article from 1996
http://www.creationresearch.org/creatio ... m9703.html
-- a very good article from a creation publication
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2354533.stm -- strong doubts as early as a couple of years ago
http://www.debatabase.org/details.asp?topicID=110 -- a good list of pros and cons as of 2000
http://mars.astrobio.net/news/article114.html -- a very interesting article on the pro side of nanobacteria being markers of life.
The point is, Helix, research this thing if you are interested in it. Don't just take a snippet from an article and use it as a challenge. It's an interesting subject and certainly worth any time you spend on it.
However, since these nanoballs and nanobacteria are evidently results of breakdown of organic life, they would have nothing to do with abiogenesis.