Mars Canals May Not Mean Water

Ant writes " NASA scientists are beginning to suspect that the widely reported water channels on Mars were actually caused by jets of carbon dioxide. At a conference at NASA's Ames Research Center, NASA researcher Robert Haberle said scientists now think Martian gullies believed to have been carved by liquid water may instead have been produced by flutes of liquid carbon dioxide, a finding that could have profound effects on future missions to the Red Planet." This story has been bouncing around for a while.h

Comments

salami science

[bcrowell]

This is the second lame Wired article about Mars to be featured within a short period. (The other was this article with Slashdot discussion here ; .) The first one (about water) was even worse, since it was completely misleading, obviously the result of careless research (didn't make the distinction between geologically recent and geologically ancient water-erosion features).

This is known in the science trade as salami science: slice your work really thin and publish lots of short, incomplete articles so your c.v. looks more impressive. Why can't Wired write a single carefully researched Mars article instead of lots and lots of shallow ones?

The Wired articles are also pretty pathetic because they never include any out-going links to more substantial academic or government articles. If Wired is supposed to be an example of really modern internet journalism, why do they use the web as if it was made of dead trees?