(Yet) Another Year End List

gordonb writes "New Scientist has yet another of those endless end-of-year lists, "13 things that do not make sense", including such topics discussed on Slashdot this year as the placebo effect, dark energy, and the ever-popular cold fusion. I know there are a lot more than 13 things that don't make sense, such as free markets, but, oxymorons aside, this is an interesting list, nevertheless."

Comments

Dupe

[DaHat]

Not only that... it's not much of a year end list... being published in March of 05 after all.

Heck, this was even on /. around the same time 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense

Too bad nothing on this list has changed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the last time it was posted on /.

Re: Ooo, clever

[Black Parrot]

> Yeah, because it isn't like everyone benefits from the freemarket system. Only the Waltons benefit from their stores. Not the millions of poorer people that are able to afford more goods and live better lives because they can afford cheaper goods.

Funny about that... The current minimum [wage] places a family below the federal poverty level, unable (as Wal-Mart's chairman put it) to shop even at Wal-Mart.

Viking results and Martian life

[Chemicalscum]

Gilbert Levins labelled release (LR) results from the Viking expedition, indicating the presence of microbial life on Mars makes more and more sense. The arguements against it from the chemistry experiment on the expedition don't hold up. The experiment used a mass spectrometer (MS), the set up was designed by Klaus Bieman one of the most distinguished mass spectrometrists in the world. When they got negative results and the biology experiment got positive results, they were not going to accept it and they carried out an organized campaign to discredit the LR results proposing all sorts of experimentally unreproducible hypotheses to show that the LR results were a false positive.

Well I am a chemist and a mass spectrometrist who in my youth used to regard Bieman as an almost godlike figure. Well he was wrong. The MS results were of limited sensitivity. The most likely form microbial life in Martian soil would take is to be dormant spores waiting for the rare periods when liquid water becomes available. These spores could be in a very low level in the Martian soil well below the level that would produce sufficent quantities of organic compounds to be detectible by MS.

The LR experiment is very sensitive. Levin was able to use it to show the presence of microorganisms in Antarctic ice cores, which could not be detected chemically, but which could be confirmed by the standard microbiological procedures of plating out. Lunar rock from the Apollo mission gave no false positives in the LR experiment.

All the recent results from Mars probes showing both evidence for the existance of liquid water on the surface of Mars in the past and for evidence of the presence of water now, all serve to support the claim that the original Viking biology results provide a strong indication that microbial life is present on Mars. There is a case to answer. Now is the time for NASA to invest in sending a chiral LR experiment to Mars to further investigate and hopefully come up with some conclusive answers.