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Well, they appear to have decided it's a carbonaceous chondrite through visual examination alone - you can only really be sure by whacking it through a mass spe

by madaxe 14y ago

Well, they appear to have decided it's a carbonaceous chondrite through visual examination alone - you can only really be sure by whacking it through a mass spectrometer and seeing what isotopes you've got. Either way, I think panspermia is perfectly possible, but the jury's out until this is independently verified.

marze 14y ago
Well, if the science community ever decides Wickramasinghe is right I'll laugh. It was interesting to read about diatoms: about 25% of all photosynthesis, more than all the rainforests location on "tree of life" is unclear: "Despite a number of studies to examine phylogeny, using one or several genes, the relationships of diatoms to other groups are still unclear and there is still a huge gap in our understanding of how and when diatoms acquired their unusual morphology and life-cycle characteristics. The diatoms have often been treated as a separate phylum, reflecting their unique features. Pascher (1914, 1921) suggested that the diatoms have features in common with the Chrysophyceae and Xanthophyceae and therefore placed these classes and the Bacillariophyceae in the phylum Chrysophyta. Ultrastructural and molecular sequence data have confirmed the general thrust of Pascher’s idea, placing the diatoms unambiguously among the heterokont protists (‘stramenopiles’) within the chromalveolates (Adl et al. 2005)." and Wickramasinghe has hypothesized interstellar dust might be diatoms(!): "there exists a close correspondence between the measured infrared properties of diatoms and the infrared spectrum of interstellar dust as observed in the Trapezium nebula and toward the galactic center source GC-IRS 7. Diatoms and bacteria also exhibit an absorbance peak near 2200 Å, which is found to agree with the observed ultraviolet absorbance properties of interstellar grains."

by madaxe 14y ago

marze 14y ago

Well, if the science community ever decides Wickramasinghe is right I'll laugh. It was interesting to read about diatoms: about 25% of all photosynthesis, more than all the rainforests location on "tree of life" is unclear: "Despite a number of studies to examine phylogeny, using one or several genes, the relationships of diatoms to other groups are still unclear and there is still a huge gap in our understanding of how and when diatoms acquired their unusual morphology and life-cycle characteristics. The diatoms have often been treated as a separate phylum, reflecting their unique features. Pascher (1914, 1921) suggested that the diatoms have features in common with the Chrysophyceae and Xanthophyceae and therefore placed these classes and the Bacillariophyceae in the phylum Chrysophyta. Ultrastructural and molecular sequence data have confirmed the general thrust of Pascher’s idea, placing the diatoms unambiguously among the heterokont protists (‘stramenopiles’) within the chromalveolates (Adl et al. 2005)." and Wickramasinghe has hypothesized interstellar dust might be diatoms(!): "there exists a close correspondence between the measured infrared properties of diatoms and the infrared spectrum of interstellar dust as observed in the Trapezium nebula and toward the galactic center source GC-IRS 7. Diatoms and bacteria also exhibit an absorbance peak near 2200 Å, which is found to agree with the observed ultraviolet absorbance properties of interstellar grains."