Slashdot Mirror
'Alien Life' Story of Dubious Provenance Goes Viral
Sockatume writes "By now you have likely read about the 'alien life forms' discovered in the upper atmosphere over Yorkshire, via the mass media reprinting a press release from the University of Sheffield. Unfortunately, the paper comes from researchers with an infamous tendency to identify inanimate objects as aliens, and is published in a journal that seems to principally exist to print unlikely astrobiological claims. Phil Plait points out flaws in a number of their claims. Quoting: 'They found what appears to be a fragment of a frustrule, the hard outer casing around a diatom. It certainly does look like one. But is it? Weirdly, they apparently didn’t even check. Seriously, in the paper they describe the photo of the object and say [emphasis mine], "On one stub was discovered part of a diatom which, we assume, is clear enough for experts on diatom taxonomy to precisely identify." That implies very strongly they didn’t ask an expert in diatoms to look at their sample. That’s bizarre. If I were claiming this were an ET plant, that’s the very first thing I’d do!'"
My submission was only a crumb of that summary.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"By now you have likely read about the 'alien life forms' discovered in the upper atmosphere over Yorkshire, via the mass media reprinting a press release from the University of Sheffield.
The what from the who now? Shitty writing. "Oh, by now I'm sure you've heard about the $TRIVIAL_EVENT that occurred 4,000 miles from where I reside 99.999% of my life.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I don't know, paper was generated by MIT, so it just may be legit http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
Ey up... here are some images of t' alleged Yorkshire aliens' purported spacecraft.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
We brought back samples from the moon, if this stuff is floating around all of the time out in space just waiting to land, why did we not find anything in the moon samples? The stuff was obviously thrown up from the ground if it is organic, one cannot assume just from the height that it had to be from space.
http://phys.org/news/2013-09-volcanic-eruptions-beneath-bodies-widespread.html
"I'm not saying it was aliens, but..wait, you know, what, no, not even I think these are aliens."
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Yes, it is a diatom. A broken piece of a frustule of one. Judging from the morphology it looks like a pennate species, although which one it is would take some work to figure out.
But why people would think finding a bit of a diatom either high in the atmosphere or as a subsequent contaminant sitting on top of your SEM stub during analysis, I have no idea. The things are fricking *everywhere* in ordinary dust from natural sources. They are also commonly used for filtration and other industrial purposes ("diatomaceous earth"). I've even seen them in drinking water samples, either somehow managing to get through the regular filters or perhaps from the filters themselves. Earthly contamination is very, very likely, and it makes no sense to consider this example as anything but. Saying a species of diatom is from space is a sloppy and nonsensical conclusion.