Vital sign

Indian fortune hunter Raju Gound is someone who leaves no stone unturned. It’s literally been his occupation for the last 10 years to hunt for diamonds.

In the diamond reserves of Krishna Kalyanpur Patti village near Panna, Madhya Pradesh state — where other prospectors also lease areas from the government to look for the precious stone — Gound turned lucky one Wednesday last month.

“I was sifting through the stones and saw something that resembled a piece of glass. I held it up to my eyes and saw a faint glint. That’s when I knew I had found a diamond,” BBC quoted Gound as saying.

He took the stone to the government diamond office which appraised the 19.22-carat gem to be worth 8 million rupees ($95,570).

Meanwhile, a rock found in an uninhabitable place is touted by scientists as proof that life previously existed there.

A robotic explorer stumbled on a vein-filled red rock on 18 July. According to researchers, the spots in the rock were traces of a chemical reaction by microorganisms.

David Flannery, a member of the NASA Perseverance science team and an astrobiologist at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, said the rock’s features “are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface,” CNN reports.

NASA scientists said the rock recently found by the Mars rover Perseverance has to be analyzed on earth to verify if its spots indicate that the Red Planet was once hospitable to life, according to CNN.