Slashdot Mirror
Alien Bacteria May Have Landed in India
coastal984 writes "CNN & Popular Science are reporting that a scientist in India believes he may have discovered alien life in water collected from a unusually colored rainstorm. From the article: 'So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India.'"
Much more detail about this phenomenon can be found here and here.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
It would also be fruitful to mention that that Google turns up these stories with the most obvious of keywords: alien rain India site:slashdot.org.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
If you read the article, it says even the scientist himself is skeptical of the idea. I think he is just throwing it out as a possibility, and it's being exaggerated by the reporters, as it makes for an interesting headline.
If you bothered to RTFA, you'd notice that it has infact been "been distributed to a variety of scientists" for evaluation. Excerpts for your kind perusal:
In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples -- water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis's home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001 -- contain microbes from outer space.
Last winter, Louis sent some of his samples to astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe and his colleagues at Cardiff University in Wales, who are now attempting to replicate his experiments; Wickramasinghe expects to publish his initial findings later this year.
The next significant step, explains University of Sheffield microbiologist Milton Wainwright, who is part of another British team now studying Louis's samples, is to confirm whether the cells truly lack DNA. So far, one preliminary DNA test has come back positive.
More analysis showing possible signs of DNA here:
http://www.astrobiology.cf.ac.uk/redrain.html
You say the story has been surfacing periodically before... any examples of that in a peer-reviewed journal? I skimmed the actual article (in Astrophysics and Space Science which is 13 pages long so won't be copied here) and he basically suggests a couple hypothesis that don't work, i.e. dust, pollen, fungal spores etc. The fact that the cells look like biological cells but have no trace of DNA/RNA is the oddity. If it is terrestrial in origin, then it's something never seen before. Or his tests are wrong. Others are working to verify his results.
Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_rain_of_Kerala
The red tint can easily come from bacteria called iron bacteria. I am familiar with water wells and the necessity sometimes for disinfecting and filtering the water before use from those microbes.(having the old lady go medieval on you from her losing a set of all-whites in the wash is a good motivator for research and corrective actions with said infected well :p ) Here is a URL for your perusal on this subject
a cteria.html
http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/wells/ironb
http://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0312/0312639. pdf
He goes into quite a bit of detail about the test they ran on these bugs. Pretty interesting stuff.