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Raining Extraterrestrial Microbes in Kerala?
jdfox writes "World Science is reporting on a controversial paper to be published shortly in the peer-reviewed research journal Astrophysics and Space Science, describing a strange red rain that fell in India in 2001, shortly after a meteor airburst event in the area. The authors posit that the red particles found in the raindrops may be extraterrestrial microbes. The authors' last two papers on the subject were unpublished: this published paper is more cautious. The paper can be viewed online, and should obviously be considered in context. More info on the 'panspermia' hypothesis can be found at Wikipedia."
Seems this theory has gained some flack from the Intelligent Design community.
p hp/id/849
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.
I've read about quite a few of these colored rain falls and most of them have an obvious terrestrial source. They usually are volcanic or caused by birds or insects. It's one thing for trace amounts of organic matter to survive reentry but large amounts are highly unlikely. Organic material would mostly be incinerated. A comet fragment would have a better chance with the ice protecting the organic matter. I doubt the paper will survive peer review.
Interesting idea, but when you prepare SEM samples, they often shrivel up a bit.
They are about the right size though, these particles range in size from 4 to 10 m. And human RBCs are about 6-8 m. It would explain the lack of a nucleus and DNA too.
But the TEM images are all wrong (thick "cell wall"), and the low Iron and high silicon content makes it very suspect too.
Spock's blood?
But seriously I hope they send some of these things over to other labs for investigation (like mine!) I would start with universal primers, PCR can amplify the tiniest amount of DNA, all they did was dunk the `cells' in Edithium bromide.
I just made a copy/paste from an online converter ;)
Though, to correct your american ignorance, the thousands-separator varie between countries, as does the rest of the punctuation. In the USA you guys use commas, in the UK it's periods, in France just a space and in Switzerland it's " ' ", and that's just the ones I know.
Thus, one million dollars and fifty cents would be spelled:
In the USA: $1,000,000.50
In the UK: $1.000.000,50
In France: $1 000 000,50
In Switzerland: $1'000'000.50
Yup, it sometimes makes it a helluva confusing...
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Unless they botched their elemental composition analysis, they appear to be mostly carbon and oxygen. Page 9 of the latest preprint (pardon the formatting):
Element Wt % Atomic % Standards
C 49.53 57.83 CaCO3
O 45.42 39.82 Quartz
Na 0.69 0.42 Albite
Al 0.41 0.21 Al2O3
Si 2.85 1.42 Quartz
Cl 0.12 0.05 KCl
Fe 0.97 0.24 Fe
In any case, the first two preprint's language made me cringe. The whole "life-cycle" section.... [shudder]
My motorbike travels in Chile.
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I would start with universal primers, PCR can amplify the tiniest amount of DNA, all they did was dunk the `cells' in Edithium bromide.
I call shenanigans on their methodology. All they did was manually grind up the cells - once with a mortar and pestel, once with the same under liquid nitrogen. That **does not** ensure any breakage of many kinds of protist cells.
We do this kind of stuff in my lab. We frequently have to use a French Press with monstrously high pressures to get many single-celled eukaryotes to break open.
Looks like some kind of red algae to me.
I don't think so... did you see the elemental analyses?
Yes I did, but I don't believe it. I think they've messed up the analysis. SEMs are better suited to thin films than particulates, and the components listed in their analysis don't seem a good match for the physical characteristics of the particles.
If there actually is a high proportion of carbon in the material, it's likely to be from an iron-rich calcium carbonate meteorite instead.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
To understand how this article could be published, you should be aware that for all scientific journals the editor has the last responsibility for accepting a paper, not the peer reviewers. In the case of Astrophysics and Space Science, the editorial board contains N.C. Wickramasinghe, who is one of the inventors of the panspermia theory. So, even although peer reviews might have been dodgy, it could have been an editorial decision to accept this paper.
I happen to know that Astrophysics and Space Science operates this way, as a manuscript I co-reviewed with a PhD student of mine several years ago appeared in the journal without taking any of our recommendations into account. This has not happened to me with any of the 30odd manuscripts I have refereed since and is even more astonishing since the journal decided to print the original manuscript, without even addressing the large number of grammatical mistakes and spelling errors pointed out by us (which were so bad that we, as referees, could not understand what the authors were trying to say). I have declined to referee for Astrophysics and Space Science since and consider the journal a "scientific tabloid" as opposed to a "scientific broadsheet". And you wouldn't believe the "Sun" and the "News of the World" either, right?
So, to conclude, "peer refereed" does not always mean what you might think it does, and although I am not a microbiology specialist, as long as a report on the "red rain" is not accepted by a mainstream journal, would doubt any claims made in the article.