India's red rain may contain life not seen on Earth
news.com.au
news.com.au
The 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".
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.
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.
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.
Sigh. Nine years, no independent verification. For reproducible incredibly unique behavior like that? 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.
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.
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.
You seem to think that the normal practice is to get widespread experimental confirmation before publication of any kind. It isn't. The point of scientific publishing is to make a result available for verification or invalidation by people who have no connection with the original experimenter. In peer-reviewed journals the referees serve this purpose, but there is nothing wrong with offering up the result for testing by others, especially since the required equipment is available in just about any biology lab.
Your original comment complaining about 'nine years with no verification' suggests you thought the scientists in question had been making these claims since the red rain fell back in 2001. this is not the case either.
I don't think that Dr. Louis gets to verify his own work.
If you find it on earth there is a bit of problem with right away drawing the conclusion that it is alien in nature. You could say the same thing about any other life on earth, or at least the initial life forms that gave rise to all the others. Just because it 'rained down' doesn't make it alien right away (rain contains tons of bacteria, in fact bacteria play a large role in the formation of rain! http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/99093.php).
There exists such a thing as an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile , an organism that lives in conditions not normally associated with life.
These are quite fascinating, but still use 'our' DNA, it would not be too farfetched to suggest that an even earlier branch of life, split off before DNA was nailed down managed to live in some forgotten corner of our biosphere.
Most - but not all - geneticists agree that before we had the current 4 base DNA there may have been one using only 2 bases, so the evolutionary machinery itself is evolving as well.
It could be that if you go another step backwards, that you end up with cell like structures that have no DNA but that can still replicate. Certain clays have this capability, as Richard Dawkins noted in 'the blind watchmaker', and there are other variations on this theme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
If these things actually reproduce, couldn't they give some to someone else? That someone else could then check to see if the things behave as reported. The "came from space" claim is more difficult to verify, but the other things (e.g. no DNA and no RNA) should be easy to check, and are interesting in their own right.
They published it on 1 Sep. 2010. Give them some time.
And if they do, they might simply be extremophiles, see above. Something isn't 'normal earth life' because you say so, something isn't earth life because you show it to reproduce (not because you say so) and because you prove that after you've conclusively proven that it indeed does reproduce does not contain any of our normal DNA, which should be fairly trivial.
Then you make samples available for each and every lab in the world that wants a slice of they pie by reproducing your results.
Research in isolation tends to produce un-reproducible results, the guy that did the original research is heavily involved in this effort so it does not count as any confirmation of the earlier claims.
Remember: Pons, Fleischmann, Percival Lowell, Hwang Woo-suk and many many others.
While slow, I can see how something like this would need heavily evidence-supported data to be even remotely non-laughable in even scientific communities.
Now I'm not disagreeing in saying that proving something "simple" like, say, the ability for the cells to reproduce at 121C could be somewhat easily verified, but usually with things like this just verifying something like that isn't grounds for publication by any means.
It's not that it's not interesting, but we're trying to prove that these are extraterrestrial life forms here. They're going to definitely want to prove, independently, the whole (likely) bundle of proposed theories, such as the fluorescence possibly linking them to (in the article) the Red Rectangle, plus verification that they do not have any type of DNA or RNA (harder than you'd think), plus other behaviorial/evolutionary traits not yet discovered before they consider it "proven" or otherwise.
To say that since one cannot be verified, thus it is all irrelevant or false is just impatience. Work with a grad student sometime who is pursuing their dissertation, haha.
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.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.
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".
"Growth and replication of red rain cells at 121 oC and their red fluorescence" (2010 August)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1008.4960v1
"The Red Rain phenomenon of Kerala and its possible extraterrestrial origin" (2006 January)
Bit hard to get a piece of rock to do that, no?
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
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?
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.
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.
Nor am I not suggesting any unusual atmospheric phenomena; I'm pointing out that that part of the atmosphere is known to differ substantially from lower altitudes. Multiple interacting tides, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_tide
I was not aware that prions were considered a lifeform.
I can't believe that this news article is quoting from commenters on the technologyreview arxiv blog.
Specifically, an argument amongst all scientists.
all-in: involving everyone
boffin: scientist
barney: argument (from rhyming slang: "Barney Rubble" - "trouble")
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.
Much less than none?
"Let alone" is also idiomatic English so might not clarify things if the parent was unfamiliar with "much less."
It's a common colloquialism that we use in that part of the world.
Right, except there is a word for those organisms, some of which do thrive at those temperatures: 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?
I wouldn't fault the newspaper as much as I would fault the original research.
1. INTRODUCTION Most forms of life on Earth are adapted to growth within the temperature range, 10-45C. Microorganisms, known as thermophiles, however, grow optimally between 45C and 70C. Recently novel microbes, growing at temperatures above 80C have ben reported, and the upper temperature limit for growth has been extended to 113C and 121C by the discovery of Pyrolobus fumarii and “strain 121”, both having been isolated from hydrothermal vents (Kashefi and Lovley, 2003). Stetter (1992) termed these newly discovered microorganisms “hyperthermophiles”. There also exist in the literature disputed claims that bacteria, isolated from black smokers can grow at 250C (Baross and Deming, 1983). Louis and Kumar (2003) also reported that red cells which fell in so-called “Red Rain” over at Kerala in India (and which are studied here) could replicate at 300 C (Louis and Kumar, 2003, 2006), a claim that needs to be verified independently if it is to gain acceptance.
Wickramasingh and Wainwright were publicly critical of the earlier claims made by Louis and Kumar in 2003. This paper investigates one aspect of those claims by testing whether any growth of these cells take place, and if so whether it can occur at high temperatures. The answer to both those questions is 'yes'. It's reasonable to begin by investigating whether the phenomenon occurs at the known upper temperature bound mentioned in the first citation, and to solicit confirmation of that result, before investigating other conditions for growth whose very possibility is speculative at present.
I don't know why you're ragging on this paper so much. The news report is trash but the paper is cautious (indeed the Louis papers are a good deal more cautious than their linkbaity titles might suggest). Even if further study determines that that the cells are definitely terrestrial, the fact that such 'extremophiles' are not confined to extreme environments like the walls of volcanoes or undersea is itself news.