There you go again, Barry. Mixing stuff up again.

This story about the ASU poster at the AGU conference has gotten a bit more attention than it deserves. The "authors" of the poster admit themselves that this work is highly speculative and inconclusive. There were other poster presentations at the same conference suggesting other mechanisms at work behind the "dark streaks" only the authors of these posters didn't publish a news release overstating the implications of their work as did Mr. Ferris.

But, more importantly, even if some of these streaks are the result of ephemeral springs of briny water percolating to the surface, their presence does not contradict the emerging model of Mars as a perpetually freeze-dried planet punctuated in its past by brief warm periods. Nor would they alter the reality that liquid water simply isn't stable at the surface of Mars.