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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 The authors' last two papers on the subject were unpublished: this published paper is more cautious.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."
Just what we needed.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Spreading his Glorious seed.
Case closed! Who wants lunch?
At least it's not Thread.
It was just Venus' time of the month, and it made it's way through space to reach us here.
Seems this theory has gained some flack from the Intelligent Design community.
p hp/id/849
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.
I strongly suggest looking through this article (Yes, I know this is Slashdot, how could I suggest such a thing) as I found the summary made me extremely skeptical. If the information is not falsified, I would say it is certainly worth investigating, even with a hefty grain of salt. . . or would that be grains? . . .anyway I digress. I found the electron microscope pictures quite intriguing, it certainly "looked" like a cell, though I understand this sort of observation is hardly irrefutable. I did not see any evidence of the particles replicating which would suggest life (they could replicate and still not be considered "life" ofcourse). I believe a good analog would be the potential bacteria found in a Martian meteor.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
This human researcher is clearly incorrect.
The red particles that landed in sector omega-3 were obviously not a virus know as MindGobblers designed to manipulate the portions of your puny brains involved with sensory reception effectivly allow us to transform you into a slave race.
I suggest you fellow humans all make bad jokes about human researcher and realize his findings are not true.
I stole this Sig
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.
Iron oxide chondrules with carbon as the main ingredient? I don't think so... did you see the elemental analyses?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
The /. editorial doesn't mention elemental composition of the particles. From TFA:
45.4% quartz (!) 49.5% carbonate calcium
Doesn't look like life or organic at all. Another case of wishful thinking.
This could be the ultimate proof the ID camp has been looking for... God jerking off, spreading his seed, instilling life into the lifeless soil. The Beloved Gardener in the Heavenly Paradise Cometh unto us.
The prevalence of the red rain along the southwest coast of India is explained in the paper as being the trail of a meteor that happened to follow the coast. I explain it with this June- Sept precipitation map, which shows the coast receiving 150 cm of rain while areas immediately to the east get 30 cm. Red rain fell in areas where rain is likely to fall. No need to invoke a meteor for which there is little evidence.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
This illustrates a problem with the way science is presently conducted.
Apparently, two years ago a scientist in India wrote a paper about a long series of tests he conducted on a potential non-dna based life form that can reproduce at 300C and may have arrived on a comet.
Of course it sounds unlikely, but if he's right, it is the scientific find of the century.
And, he has samples of the purported organism.
If scientists were really seeking uncover truth, they'd have repeated his work at five different labs and see if it held up.
Instead, they're all to scared of looking silly to their peers, and they barely even let the Indian researcher publish his findings!
Does anyone else see this as a problem?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Raining Extraterrestrial Microbes in Kerala?
Meanwhile, Occam turned in his grave.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
>> This is a stupid paper.
Not at all. Their research examines quite a large range of characteristics of the particles and of the rainfall, and even presents some controls. It's not as tight as some nor, as sloppy as others, but falls well within the mean of the scientific method.
The fact that one particular type of test was not performed by them does not make this a stupid paper --- it just leaves that analysis for some other team to perform. Indeed, they seem to have covered a collosal amount of ground for a single research group already.
Their Discussion section is not part of their scientific findings, but merely provides room for discussion. Non-DNA-based "life" from outer space is a *possible* handwaving interpretation at best, but since no other interpretation matches both the microscopic visual structure and the chemical composition and the rain-distribution pattern simultaneously, it's the best we have at this stage.
>> Trivial test - stain them for bloody cellulose!
Go right ahead and do it yourself, or communicate with them about it. But who said that ET life would employ cellulose anyway? That notwithstanding, it would be a useful test to perform anyway, as it would help discount other possibilities.
Their earlier non-peer-reviewed papers might have been worth your label of "stupid" (meaning non-scientific) in part, but this one is quite factual in all its research sections.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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.
You'd think carbon was rare or otherwise exceptional in meteorites. It isn't. It is abundant in carbonaceous chrondites. Some of them practically look like charcoal. But you're right, the analysis shows these things aren't mainly iron.
I don't see anything clearly biological here, and even if there was, the connection to something extraterrestrial rather than terrestrial is tenuous. Don't get me wrong -- it's interesting, but A) there's already a long history of such hunts in ordinary meteorites, and B) that hunt has been pretty unsatisfying, with loads of examples of probable or demonstrated terrestrial contamination, and loads of examples of things that "look like" biological structures, but aren't upon more detailed examination.
People are *way* too interested in seeing something exotic here rather than looking at all the possibilities, including ordinary mineralogical ones, and ordinary terrestrial ones. The authors have done a poor job of eliminating some of these others. Where is the extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claims? I mean, that analysis is really poor in some ways. Using EDAX on an SEM rather than a dedicated microprobe is a poor way to do it for such small structures, and where's the X-ray diffraction in case there is anything crystalline here? Not even attempted.
At least the DNA/RNA tests do look decent, because they included a positive test of the technique and were apparently thorough about breaking the structures up, but there is no guarantee there would be DNA or RNA present if there has been sufficient degradation (in either hypothesis!). What if these are highly degraded fungal spores? Their cell walls are extremely durable (they survive for geological eons). That hypothesis could explain the composition, the morphology, and the absence of DNA or RNA. Why didn't they test for the presence of typical fungal spore wall materials?
Finally, I find the arguments regarding the connection to the supposed meteor airburst rather ridiculous. The evidence for the event itself is poor in the first place -- sonic boom? That's it? I'm sorry, I need a little more than that. How do we know there weren't supersonic military aircraft in the area the time, or that people were mistaking something else for a sonic boom? Worse, most of the arguments they use to dispute the possibility of a terrestrial source contributing to the location of the fallout for 2 months would also apply to a meteor. What, there aren't any high-altitude winds here? The plume just lingered for that long? Is there something about meteor plumes that allow them to linger but not the terrestrial possibilities? High-altitude volcanic ash can spread across a whole continent in just a few days!
No, I think a regional terrestrial source is much more likely for whatever these things are, and they've done a poor job eliminating that possibility. Given all the weird stuff that sometimes gets sucked up into rainstorms and later found falling to the ground (e.g., frogs, fish), you've got to be skeptical, unless we're going to claim those could be extraterrestrial too.