Yahoo news is trumpeting this:
Aliens exist, and we have proof.
That astonishingly awesome claim comes from Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, who says he has found conclusive evidence of alien life — fossils of bacteria found in an extremely rare class of meteorite called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. (There are only nine such meteorites on planet Earth.) Hoover’s findings were published late Friday night in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/nasascientistfindsevidenceofalienlife
Fortunately, they also link to this:
Did Scientists discover bacteria in meteorites?
No, no, no. No no no no no no no no.
No, no.
No.
Fox News broke the story, which ought to make one immediately suspicious — it’s not an organization noted for scientific acumen. But even worse, the paper claiming the discovery of bacteria fossils in carbonaceous chondrites was published in … the Journal of Cosmology. I’ve mentioned Cosmology before — it isn’t a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth. It doesn’t exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacter.php technically peer-reviewed journals that seem to exist merely to let those published therein say their stuff has been “peer reviewed”, although respectable scientists won’t go near such journals.
Impossible! The journal of cosmology is under attack!
Do not rest on your laurels and pretend to be superior. Do something with the masses and save it!
Do you mean to say that crank papers being reviewed by crank reviewers do not qualify as “peer-reviewed”?
Well yes they are, but when your peers are utter bollock-munchers as well it really doesn’t help your case very much.
BigT
March 8, 2011, 3:11pm
6
You’re ignoring the best news. Apparently time travel will be invented in just two years!
[spoiler]Original quote in case they fix it:
Mar 6, 2013 update: You’ll find a longer post on this at my main blog, Neuron Culture: Aliens Riding Meteorites: Arsenic Redux, or Something New?
[/spoiler]
I’ll leave the end of the world comment for someone else.
