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India's red rain may contain life not seen on Earth
- wallflower 16y agoI know a girl from Kerala. It is a very beautiful place - very lush - from the photos I have seen. I will have to ask her about the Red Rain. "Growth and replication of red rain cells at 121 oC and their red fluorescence" (2010 August) http://arxiv.org/pdf/1008.4960v1 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1008.4960v1 "The Red Rain phenomenon of Kerala and its possible extraterrestrial origin" (2006 January) http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0601/0601022v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0601/0601022v1.pdf
- kranner 16y agoThe paper from 2006 (second link above) has very interesting scanning electron microscope pictures of the critters (3D reconstructions).
- jacquesm 16y agoThese look quite similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microspherulite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microspherulite
- kranner 16y agoYes, but the first paper has images of daughter cells in various stages of reproduction. Bit hard to get a piece of rock to do that, no?
- jacquesm 16y agoI don't see a daughter cell in various stages of reproduction, I see different 'cells', and I'm not sure at all if they're cells or not. They could be dead single celled organisms with some kind of outer coating. A time-lapse series of the same cells from the first image would be conclusive evidence, that can't be too hard to make, a magnification of 1,000 is well within the abilities of oil immersion objective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xk_piPBnwY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xk_piPBnwY
- train_robber 16y agoI am from Kerala. This was obviously big news when it happened. But on my mind, this was a closed issue a few years back, when it was 'proved' that the colour was due to some algae. I'm a bit surprised by this now, and also surprised that none of the local papers have carried the story.
- ggrot 16y agoThat is alot of speculation for something that the article says is "rejected by the scientific community at large" and "yet to be verified".
- keyle 16y agoIt's easier to dismiss theories than nail one...
- vecter 16y agoI guess the question is, why does this theory deserve to not be dismissed? There are (pulling a number out of my ass) tens of thousands of theories on anything and certainly not enough resources to test them all. I think the burden of proof rests with those pushing a new idea. There are people working on this, but without further substantiation, there's nothing special about it.
- Twisol 16y agoIt's the "panspermia angle" that's "rejected by the scientific community at large", whereas the other findings (i.e. lack of DNA) are "yet to be verified". One step at a time: they may not be able to show extraterrestrial origin, but they have experimental evidence of reproduction at high heat, and an apparent lack of genetic material. If nothing else, those points are _extremely_ interesting.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoThe team's findings are yet to be verified. Sigh. Nine years, no independent verification. For reproducible incredibly unique behavior like that? Verification of a real phenomenon would be massive and immediate.
- marze 16y ago"Verification of a real phenomenon would be massive and immediate" Incorrect. Something involving alien life, comets, etc? Scientists run the other way. In a sense, this publication is verification by scientists in the UK of a previous paper by Dr. Louis that described the cells/particles/whatever reproducing at high temperature. If the cells are of extraterrestrial origin and are not DNA-based, this will be the scientific discovery of the century. One would hope that other labs will step forward and attempt to reproduce the work.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoYou've misunderstood me. Take any of the phenomenon described, say "organisms that reproduce at 121 degrees" Send samples out, samples are reheated, other independent scientists verify this cause and effect. Sure, the entire set of wild claims would take a heckuva lot of verification. But any one of the claims? Dead simple. Why don't we have independent verification of dead simple things? Probably because there is no verification to be had, sadly.
- marze 16y agoI wouldn't be surprised if the Cardiff group spent six months on the research and three years getting the paper accepted. Agreed, it would have been nice if the Dr. Louis had sent samples to any lab that would take them, but instead he sent them to just one lab. Besides a possible lack of labs volunteering, perhaps he was motivated to retain as much credit for what he felt would be an important discovery. In any case, I still would like to see some other facilities step forward and attempt to verify the work.
- 16y ago
- marze 16y agoLink to the paper: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1008/1008.4960.pdf http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1008/1008.4960.pdf
- vecter 16y agoThe team also found an unusual pattern in the way the cells changed colour under UV light, known as "fluorescence behaviour". They said it was "in remarkable correspondence" with red emissions from the Red Rectangle planetary nebula some 2300 light years away, "suggesting, though not proving, an extraterrestrial origin". You have got to be kidding me.
- jacquesm 16y agoI think you could find a good spectral match for just about anything given the number of stars out there. This whole thing screams pseudo science at me, and I'm still not sure what exactly is the state of arxiv published research. It's a mixed bag.
- jonhendry 16y agoI think that currently, to get on arxiv you just need some arxiv-trusted person to vouch for your work. The idea being that if you vouch for too many kooks they stop letting you vouch for anyone.
- jacquesm 16y agoAny cook is a blemish on arxiv that diminishes both arxiv and all the rest of the publications on there. There is the reason why big name publications are very careful not to be associated with cranks, reputable scientists will start to avoid your publication and that is the start of a downward spiral. Axxiv would do well to increase their barrier to entry to up the quality, the principle is great but the execution so far is less than fantastic. And that's a pity because something like arxiv with a really good reputation is badly needed. So, very good peer-review of all that's input and fewer rather than more 'publications' of excellent quality, with a very good set of verification criteria for extraordinary claims.
- marze 16y agoUnlikely sounding indeed. You look around, you see people, you see bacteria. They came from somewhere. One possibility is single cell organisms evolved from nothing on Earth, the other is their ancestors evolved somewhere else and arrived from space, a theory called panspermia. The panspermia theory was fringy at first, but is now covered in every Astronomy 101 textbook. For those unfamiliar, here is the short version of the theory: You have a star with a planet with microbes living in water. When the star goes through the red giant phase, the oceans are boiled off and blown off into space along with some microbes. The microbes move from star to star through space, and seed new planets around new stars. You'd expect to see them as dust in interstellar space if this was happening. The spectra of a lot of observed dust is indeed unexplained, supporting but obviously not proving the panspermia theory. Researchers at Cardiff, where this current work was done, have done a lot of the fundamental work on panspermia, theoretically checking the mechanisms to verify they are consistant with known laws. Now we have this claim from India that microbe spores that reproduce between 100C and 300C have been recovered from rain water, and the Cardiff guys have a sample to experiment with. It is the nature of science not to accept radical new theories quickly, the joke goes that it takes about 30 years, long enough for the scientists to die and the new generation to arrive. If scientists want to accelerate the rate of progress, unexpected results should be investigated carefully and aggressively.
- danilocampos 16y agoI want to believe.
- patrickgzill 16y agoI am listening to Peter Gabriel, truly the man is a prophet ... he did a song called "Red Rain" years ago .
- mitko 16y ago> While many spores on Earth can survive that kind of extreme heat, none have yet been discovered that can reproduce in those conditions, much less require it to begin reproducing. Much less than none?
- jeromec 16y agoReplace "much less" with "let alone".
- carbocation 16y agoAs I think you're alluding, "much less" is idiomatic English, and is used correctly in the article. Basically, it means "certainly not." "Let alone" is also idiomatic English so might not clarify things if the parent was unfamiliar with "much less."
- jeromec 16y agoIt didn't occur to me that the source of the OP's confusion might be that he/she is a non-native English speaker. The "much less" idiom simply seemed a poor choice to use in a sentence focusing on quantities.
- bluesmoon 16y agos/much less/to say nothing of/ It's a common colloquialism that we use in that part of the world.
- carbocation 16y ago>He says the cells - inert at room temperature - begin to reproduce at 121C. ... While many spores on Earth can survive that kind of extreme heat, none have yet been discovered that can reproduce in those conditions, much less require it to begin reproducing. Right, except there is a word for those organisms, some of which do thrive at those temperatures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile (Specifically, organisms are known that grow at up to 122 deg Celsius.) Did this newspaper do any actual research before making those claims?
- gowiththeflow 16y ago"The only lifeforms that occur or Earth without DNA, according to another commentor, are proteins known as 'prions', best known on Earth as the cause of Mad Cow Disease." I was not aware that prions were considered a lifeform.
- Devilboy 16y agoIt depends on the definition of 'life' you're using. There's lots of disagreement on what the definition should be exactly.
- carbocation 16y agoThere really is nobody arguing that prions are alive. Unlike viruses, for which there is at least a vigorous debate, prions just don't cut it, lacking virtually all of the features that we associate with life. I can't believe that this news article is quoting from commenters on the technologyreview arxiv blog.
- jonhendry 16y agoIf I'm not mistaken, they can 'reproduce' after a fashion, by warping other nearby normal proteins into prions.
- zitterbewegung 16y agoIf I recall correctly this was properly debunked as false. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_rain_in_Kerala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_rain_in_Kerala from the article "The color was found to be due to the presence of a large amount of spores of a lichen-forming alga belonging to the genus Trentepohlia"
- gaoshan 16y agoI'll second this. I was under the impression that it was spores of a decidedly earthbound variety. I wish it were little extraterrestrial organisms but t does not look to be the case.
- anigbrowl 16y agoI had thought so too, but it's not as simple as the Wikipedia page makes it seem. The report does consider the possibility that the red 'dye' came from a meteorite which is thought to have entered the atmosphere and exploded, but rejected this idea because it was found to be biological (as opposed to mineral). At the time of this report, nobody had suggested any exobiological explanation, so none was considered or refuted. I would be wary of relying so completely on it for a few reasons. First, the identification of the biological material as an alga of the genus Trentopohlia (which one?) was only visual in nature, and not confirmed by spectroscopic or other methods. Second, the material reproduced poorly, if at all, in growth media - except for a corn-based growth medium which had been incubated for over an hour at 60 degrees C (I presume before the introduction of the sample, their wording is a little vague). Lichens normally prefer a cool humid atmosphere; it seems Trentepohlia algae are particularly difficult to grow in culture, and I couldn't find any evidence of corn being the organism's preferred snack. There's no references so I'm not sure if this result is meant to be significant or not. Third, while the report noted the widespread presence of suitable lichens in the area and hypothesized a widespread release of spores into the air as the source of the red coloring, in the 'further studies' section following the conclusion they note that this explanation depends on phenomena that are 'quite improbable' (mass synchronous spore release in lichens is not known or thought to occur) to 'not possible': strong vertical updrafts (ie thermals) would be required to lift spores up into the atmosphere; the red rains were observed to take place in the morning, but thermals do not occur at night; rains during the preceding night and early morning were normal and should have washed out any spores which had climbed into the atmosphere the previous day. A copy is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20060613135746/http://www.geocities.com/iamgoddard/Sampath2001.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20060613135746/http://www.geociti... I don't know whether this new theory has any basis in fact. I'm just pointing out the weaknesses in the default hypothesis, as observed by the authors themselves.
- stavrianos 16y agoUh, guys... you found the rain on earth. This is where you saw it. Just sayin'. There should be some kind of rule that evidence is only strong enough to support a theory of equal or lesser weirdness. "Bacteria reproducing at 121 degrees" is way less weird than "Bacteria from outer space".
- oozcitak 16y agoOccam's Razor?
- teilo 16y agoThis reads like a Pravda article. Sensationalist and next to no substance.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jonhendry 16y agoSo Kerala was repeatedly hit by projectiles from space over a span of months, producing a red rain of alien life. But nowhere else was. As the earth spun on its axis. And the earth moved around the sun. The space-spores kept landing on Kerala. Right. How does that work, exactly?
- prodigal_erik 16y agoRelativity tells us that a frame of reference in which both the sun and the rest of the earth orbit Kerala is equally valid.
- andrewmu 16y agoI don't believe this is the case for rotation.
- superk 16y agoMore speculation... but if a comet exploded in the upper atmosphere these microparticles could have been trapped up there for while. Still would expect winds and such to spread them around...
- anigbrowl 16y agoThe hypothesis is that the rainfall followed from a single meteoric event, which preceded the first 'red rainfall' by a few hours, with greatest concentrations of red material in the 10 days afterward. Meteors burn up in the mesophere, about 40 miles above the earth's surface. There is weather up there, but not the normal wind patterns that we are used to. There are standing waves and strange weather phenomena like notilucent clouds up there that we don't fully understand; also, some gasses separate there, impossible at the higher temperature and pressures which we are used to. A trail of dust debris from an incoming meteor may take much longer to dissipate in the mesosphere than a cloud of the same size lower down.
- jonhendry 16y ago" A trail of dust debris from an incoming meteor may take much longer to dissipate in the mesosphere than a cloud of the same size lower down." Making it even less likely that it would all land in the same place. Adding unusual atmospheric phenomena on top of everything else just makes this more and more absurd.
- psiconaut 16y agothe "Growth and replication of red rain cells at 121 oC and their red fluorescence" paper at arxiv does not contain a single reference to the alledgelly-named "cells" lack of DNA (apart from being plagued of obvious spelling errors). If I were them, I wouldn't bother with spectrographic analysis if the real finding is non-dna based life form. Having worked at a biotech lab, this "study" of replication without saying anything about microbiological characterization smells like a fun replica of the Sokal affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair.
- jacquesm 16y agoSokal is a hero for doing that.
- javanix 16y agoIs 'all-in boffin barney' a respectable news phrase in Australia?