Today's Globe: genetics of life on Mars, undersea life, lessons out of med school, chocolate dream, Botox, full moon, Joslin halt

If there is life on Mars, a Harvard geneticist Gary Ruvkun thinks it resembles something we already know. Now, he's trying to prove it.

Laura Preston, a ninth-grade earth sciences teacher at Salem High School in New Hampshire, shares her blog about spending the last four weeks aboard a research vessel in the Pacific Ocean studying undersea volcanoes.

Some situations are not rehearsed in medical school, where we focused on the details of diseases, not on what to advise families struggling with problems like childhood obesity, parental smoking, overdose, television abuse, Internet pornography, and anxiety, writes Dr. Victoria Rogers McEvoy, chief of pediatrics and the medical director of the Mass. General West Medical Group and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Also in Health/Science, meet Dr. Norman Hollenberg, who is raising hopes that the secret elixir of life may have less to do with wheat germ and more with cocoa. And does Botox help with migraines and do people behave oddly when the when the moon is full?

In Business, just four months into his job as head of the Joslin Diabetes Center, Ranch Kimball has pulled the plug on the center's ambitious plan to build a new laboratory building and 29-story residential tower at its Longwood home.