Slashdot Mirror
Little Green Plants on Mars?
moorhens writes "The BBC is reporting the first evidence for chlorophyll on Mars. Without chlorophyll, plants' green pigment, and photosynthesis, life on Earth would be limited to deep ocean volcanic vents and politicians."
I'd be extremely interested to see their 'spectra' of the chlorophyll patches. I've worked with broadband astronomical imaging for a few years, and even straight forward accurate photometry can be fraught with subtle systematic effects due to the nature of the camera and the filters. My money is on scattered light from a combination of the sun-camera-rock position causing the measured colours to go skew, or an inorganic mineral with a similiar response curve to chlorophyll.
Of course, I can't go and look at the paper for myself because there is no refereed and accepted paper - releasing it as a press release when the work hasn't been peer-reviewed is just fucking stupid.
Sloppy. Damn sloppy.
Dr Fish