Could life be making its own habitable environment in the clouds of Venus?

Scientists have proposed a new theory which suggests that possible lifeforms in the clouds of Venus could be setting off a cascade of chemical reactions that is making the environment much more habitable. This self-sustaining chain of events could also explain many of the strange anomalies present in the planet's upper atmosphere that have been puzzling scientists for decades. The new hypothesis has been published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team of researchers from Cardiff University, MIT and Cambridge University. Scientists have long been puzzled by the presence of ammonia in the atmosphere of Venus, a gas that was tentatively detected in the 1970s and that by all accounts should not be produced through any chemical process known on Venus. In their new study, the researchers modeled a set of chemical processes to show that if ammonia is indeed present, the gas would set off a cascade of chemical reactions that would neutralize surrounding droplets of sulfuric acid. This would, in turn, increase the pH of the clouds from roughly -11 to 0. While still very acidic, this would be within the range of acidity that life could tolerate.