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There’s Something Funny in the Air on Mars
- king_magic 10y agoWas anyone else able to detect any semblance of a date that this article was posted? Personally, I think there is something intellectually dishonest about not including a publish date in a piece for anything remotely scientific. Context deeply matters. edit: looks like it's Nov 2016, but you need to go to the parent page to see that.
- koverstreet 10y agoWhat would _possibly_ make you think it was an act of dishonesty, instead of a simple oversight? There's waaaaaaay to much paranoia going around these days.
- markild 10y agoI didn't interpret king_magic's comment in the way that it was deceitfully dishonest, but that it was dishonest in that it lacked date. As in, that it is inherently dishonest not to publish with a date, and there doesn't necessarily have to be a dishonest intent behind it.
- pliny 10y agoHonesty is a function of intent (being honest means acting in good faith), so "unintentionally dishonest" is an oxymoron. Perhaps GP meant "misleading", but he said "dishonest" which implies intent to deceive.
- joslin01 10y agoI'm with you, but there's phrases like "intellectually dishonest", where "dishonest" doesn't imply deception as much as just a character flaw in the author where they're being unintentionally dishonest by favoring their own ideas for example. As the OP mentions, context matters and the word dishonesty has a few bends to it depending upon the situation or phrase.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- wrsh07 10y agoI assume showing the date published is the responsibility of the publisher, not the author. In which case, it's possible Nautilus has an anti pattern of not showing dates. Yeah, that seems a bit dishonest.
- king_magic 10y agoBecause, as I said, context deeply matters in science. Intentionally excluding publish date - which, by the way, is also not present on any of this piece's siblings - is intellectually dishonest. If I'm reading this piece by way of a direct link, I have no idea of when it was published, diminishing its current credibility and relevance. Having to go hunt for that information is supremely annoying, and makes me wonder if they made some intentional decision along the lines of "well, if people know this article was from 5 years ago, they probably aren't going to read it because they will go searching for something more up to date", which would in fact be dishonest. To be clear - I'm not accusing them of that, but in an era of rampant fake news, why do anything to cause your readers to question your honesty? I'm sorry, but this publisher exists in 2016, a time in which they know articles (fake or not) are frequently passed around in ways meant to misrepresent science behind them. There is no excuse for not including a publish date. None.
- CoryG89 10y agoI would take it a step further. I want a date on any kind of article, scientific or not. Bonus points for having separate published and last modified dates.
- Just1689 10y agoWell that settles it. We have the Encrypt the Web folks. I'd like to see a Version The Web
- teej 10y agoSomeone, I think it was Copyblogger and others, convinced people that to create "evergreen content" you should take dates off articles and blog posts. The web has been worse off for this advice.
- jbpetersen 10y agoThat's what repos and wikis are for IMO.
- abandonliberty 10y agoEven while you're hunting for that date you're improving their metrics :( Having a date on the article is not an advantage here. Unfortunately I don't see this going away anytime soon. Something like a browser plugin that notified you of article date could be helpful, but would face challenges in mass adoption. Have you noticed the general reduction in usefulness/efficiency of web pages? I sure have. Pages turn a 100 word answer into a 10,000 word essay with 5 videos.
- freehunter 10y agoI see that so much on technical articles. It really does make a difference if the content was published in 2007 or 2016.
- bobwaycott 10y agoAlso, footnotes citing sources.
- arethuza 10y agoIsn't that because they appear to have "Issues" and "Chapters" that are all published at different times - so in this case the parent page has the date.
- blauditore 10y agoMethane is a very simple molecule. From what I understand it's quite likely to form if there's C, H and some heat/pressure. Since H and energy have been abundant during formation of planet's, the interesting part is that there's C on mars. But calling it an "intriguing" discovery and talking about water and "the base for life" based on that seems like a stretch to me...
- ams6110 10y agoCarbon is very common as well, is it not? It's not like there's anything producing new carbon on earth, either. All we have is what was here when the planet formed.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> It's not like there's anything producing new carbon on earth, either. Actually, there is: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/carbon-141.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology...
- takingflac 10y agoBut by now the rate of creation should equal the rate of decay so even though "new" carbon is being made the amount of carbon doesn't really change.
- Sharlin 10y agoThe article explains right in the second paragraph why detecting methane is so intriguing. If you dropped a molecule of methane into the atmosphere of Mars, it would survive about 300 years—that’s how long, on average, it would take for solar ultraviolet radiation and other Martian gases to destroy the molecule. By rights, the Martian atmosphere should have been scrubbed of its methane eons ago.
- blauditore 10y agoYeah, I had read that. It could just leak out of subterrane entrapments, as they mention later in the article: > They must have been of Martian origin—perhaps a burp from a relatively small and localized subsurface source to the north of the landing site. The Martian winds would blow that methane away over several months, explaining why the signal went away when it did.
- dsfyu404ed 10y agoI was expecting a bunch of puns about nitrous oxide but all I got was a shitty article about methane. I must spend too much time on Reddit.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoThat was my first thought too - nitrous oxide on Mars. Peculiar/strange might have been better adjectives? "Funny" probably is better for SEO (like no dates on articles).
- raldi 10y agoMods, can we work "methane" into the headline?
- nthcolumn 10y agoThere is no air on Mars.
- bobsoap 10y ago> In 2003 Earth-based astronomers caught glimpses of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Intrigued to hear about those astronomer bases not on Earth, in 2016.
- Mtinie 10y agoSpace-based platforms like the Hubble, Cassini, or Chandra.