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DNA-Less 'Red Rain' Cells Reproduce At 121 C
eldavojohn writes "A new paper up for prepublication from the controversial solid-state physicist Godfrey Louis claims that the cells Louis collected from a Keralan red rain incident divide and produce daughter cells at 121 degrees Celsius. While unusual, this is not unheard of as the paper recalls cells cultivated from hydrothermal vents are known to reproduce at 121 C as well. Of course, caution is exercised when dealing with the possible explanation surrounding the theory of panspermia but the MIT Technology Review says researchers 'examined the way these fluoresce when bombarded with light and say it is remarkably similar to various unexplained emission spectra seen in various parts of the galaxy. One such place is the Red Rectangle, a cloud of dust and gas around a young star in the Monocerous constellation.'"
What does that mean? Has it been peer-reviewed yet? Has it been accepted? Or is it just at the stage where the author's submitted it, and those other steps still need to happen? The linked page only says its "submitted".
If it hasn't been accepted, posting it here is rather silly on a lot of counts. Not to mention that, with some journals, doing something like that can result in the paper being summarily rejected (e.g Nature, Science).
#DeleteChrome
Ah, youngling, you have many years until you have that PhD in your hand. What you're suggesting is a negative results, caused from "not seeing what we wanted to see", which can be rebutted in a million different ways, most of which you probably do not know yet. This is one of the reasons the peer review process exists. I personally do not believe anything I read on a non-peer reviewed paper, unless of course it is coming from well documented, well funded full professors.
. This one does have the advantage of offloading the origin-of-life-on-earth, in which case you can at least claim that maybe biogenesis only happened once somewhere else and is being blown all over the Universe, rather than having only one planet and only a billion years in which to fit your explanation.
How does that help, exactly? You still have the problem of abiogenesis somewhere. At least here on Earth you know you have the right ingredients in abundance and you don't need to invoke a low-probability transfer mechanism to explain how it got here.
I'm not saying that this rules out panspermia, but it does make it seem like rather the more complicated option, all else being equal.
IANAS but it would seem to me that the presence of enough spores in the water samples to grow a culture from in not truly indicative of the red color being primarily or even partially from the spores. Given the concentration of spores needed to color water red, the probability of rain containing that concentration is very, very low.
That isn't necessarily an argument for why the red color couldn't be spores; that's an argument for why red rains are quite rare, and why they require ideal and unusual conditions under which to occur. I would rephrase your statement to, "Given that the rain was red, the probability of the rain containing a sufficient concentration of spores to cause the coloration approaches unity". Given that we get full-scale animals falling from the sky from time to time, it's not that much of a stretch for occasional freak meteorological conditions to pick up a bunch of teeny tiny algal spores. From the last decade, the Wikipedia article I linked has stories about frogs and toads (several occasions), fish (twice), worms, and spiders. Spores are child's play.
~Idarubicin
I personally do not believe anything I read on a non-peer reviewed paper,
A peer reviewer is just someone working in a field. If you need to rely on peer reviewers to determine whether a paper in your field is credible, you're simply not competent and should find a different job. For people working in a field, peer review is useful for cutting down the crap, not for establishing credibility.
What you're suggesting is a negative results, caused from "not seeing what we wanted to see", which can be rebutted in a million different ways, most of which you probably do not know yet.
Negative results like that are incredibly useful: either they show that a particular experimental approach fails, saving other people the effort to go down that path, or they are a new phenomenon. Keeping such results from getting published is really quite harmful to science, causing needless duplication of the same dead ends again and again.