The New Scientist article says samples are being analysed in several other labs.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a terrestrial source but ‘bats’ is just crazy. I feel interesting anomolous phenomena should be investigated seriously, not dismissed out of hand with ‘comfort’ tales.
At one time ‘stones’ didn’t fall from the sky either.
Cecil cays the “cocaine mummies” bit is nonsense, and that’s good enough for me.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010126.html
Your statement that this has been “Found in collections all over the world” appears to be false. It was found in a few mummies by one group of German researchers.
Extract from a documentary on the subject
The point is - the research has been dismissed out of hand on a priori grounds and not followed up.
Apologies for my bad coding.
On the contrary, I’m currently involved with a group of folks who are extremely interested in astrobiology, and am specifically involved in a project designed to assess habitability of other worlds. I would love for someone to find real extraterrestrial cells. I just don’t think these people have done it.
Why not? Well, as I evaluate the paper, the authors are not putting forth arguments against dust as an explanation that are in any way compelling to someone trained in Earth sciences (my own perspective). Their arguments amount substantively to saying, “We don’t think it could be dust, because the red rain fell over a period of 10 days, and besides the dust doesn’t look like dust from Kerala.” What they are not grasping is that while dust clouds can and do remain suspended in the atmosphere for days at a time, and that the source of the dust doesn’t have to be anywhere near Kerala. In addition, the products of a meteorite air burst would fall out of the atmosphere a heckuva lot faster, simply because the particle sizes large enough to survive the burst would be too large to stay suspended in the atmosphere for the length of time they require. Sounds to me like they never consulted with anyone who studies dust transport, which is a bit sloppy.
Contrary to what you said, the authors most certainly did examine samples, otherwise they couldn’t have written the paper (see the acknowledgments). Yes, I saw figure 7. I’m not sure how to explain it, frankly, which isn’t a surprise to me because I’m not a trained biologist. But since I’m a geologist, I also looked at figure 4, which looks very much like iron-stained grains of sediment. By the way, there’s no way that figure 4 shows anything at 1000x magnification - they have to be off by at least an order of magnitude. (I have spent plenty of time looking at grain mounts under a petrographic microscope, and know whereof I speak.) They also include no scale within figure 4 (or any of their figures, for that matter), another sloppy oversight that would never be accepted if any geologist or biologist had properly vetted this paper. This sort of sloppiness sets off alarm bells for me, and makes me wonder what other oversights were not caught by the reviewers/journal editor.
I also looked at table 1 and figure 14, which gives a breakdown of elemental composition as provided by EDX (not EDAX, by the way; EDX stands for energy dispersive x-ray) analysis. Elemental compositions of particles are not always very enlightening, because they don’t tell you what compounds/minerals the elements are forming. I see the substantial contribution of C and O, which may or may not be forming organic compounds. Another possibility is CO[sub]3[/sub][sup]-[/sup], which is a carbonate ion and a component of limey things like shells but can also become entrained in carbonate-rich dust. I also see a good bit of Si (silica), a basic component of quartz silt, some Na and Cl (suggests aerosolized sea salt), and just enough Fe (iron) to stain and provide some color to the grains. There is nothing in here that could not be explained by some means other than an extraterrestrial source. The onus is on the authors to do what they can to eliminate the mundane, Earth-bound possibilities, and I don’t think they’ve done it here.
Okay, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for a moment and say they have some biological material on their hands. Why should the “cells” be extraterrestrial, just because they have no DNA? Earthly red blood cells have no DNA, and curiously enough, some of the images in the paper resemble the picture on the Wikipedia page. Then you can go back to talking about a boatload of bats getting hammered from space, and it’s equally plausible with the level of evidence provided in the paper.
And really, if they truly felt they had biological material, why didn’t they bring in a biologist to help them evaluate the stuff? There are certainly more sophisticated tests one could run on the samples to evaluate their origin, other than the ONE simple procedure followed by the authors. My personal physician is a smart lady, but I wouldn’t expect (or trust) her to classify a newly discovered insect from the Amazon. The authors as physicists are about as qualified to assess the rain samples, in this case.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This paper doesn’t begin to scratch the surface in providing such. I’m sorry if it upsets you, tagos, but these authors have a long way to go before their hypothesis should expect any real support.
Just to address this comment - if you think you’re dealing with something that would turn the world on its ear, the BEST thing to do is take your time and work put as much as you properly can before you publish. Nothing done well in science should be rushed.
In addition, I’ll put forth a WAG and say these authors shopped around their paper to more than one journal and got rejected until they came to a journal/editor who was not in the best position to evaluate the manuscript. It happens, unfortunately.
Generalize much from a single poster on a message board to an entire field of human endeavor millions participate in? :rolleyes:
I’m really disappointed when I see people going on and on about how science suppresses evidence whenever others aren’t bowled over with their pet notions.
Just show us the evidence, and if it’s good enough, some people will start to believe it. Don’t whine about how no one buys your story and everyone but you is really close-minded.
Back to the OP, the red rain phenomenon has gotten a lot of press, but it’s probably too early to say whether it’s actually extraterrestrial or not. Most interested scientists have probably only recently read the media coverage and haven’t had much of a chance to get a sample to look at for themselves. Let’s see if other specialists come to the same conclusion as these astronomers. Sadly, people aren’t very patient.
The only thing that upsets me is people dismissing unusual phenomena on a priori grounds as, like with plate tectonics, or Viking colonies in north America - refusing to consider evidence because it doesn’t fit preconceptions sets back science by decades.
Offering lunatic theories like exploding bats doesn’t cut it. That’s not science, that’s just ‘don’t bother me with this, I don’t want to look at it.’
Maybe Kerala will turn out to be terrestrial but unless qualified scientists look at the evidence with an open mind we’ll never know.
At least these guys are making an effort. Maybe more qualified ones should too.
You forgot “Rain of Blood,” signifying the coming apocalypse. Make sure you’re in a state of grace.
The history and philosophy and methodology of science is something I know a lot about thanks. I can generalise quite happily from 3 decades of study.
Could you please point out to me where I said it was impossible? All I have done here is point out that, IMHO, the current argument as set forth by the authors is damn weak, and I presented a few of my reasons for saying so. (No one asked me for a formal review of the paper, and I’m not going to do that here.) Since I have told you why, in my experience, the conclusions of the authors is unlikely given the evidence provided, I’m most certainly not dismissing their conclusion a priori.
And the portrait you paint of these two lonely guys in Kerala being the only seekers of truth in the matter is a bit melodramatic, don’t you think? There is a system in place for evaluating hypotheses, and while it’s not perfect, it does a pretty good job on the whole. The long debates over plate tectonics, Vikings in North America, and the existence of Archaea as separate from bacteria are noteworthy for the fact that they are uncommon in the history of modern science. Don’t try to make it sound as though it happens everyday, lest you begin to sound like Graham Hitchcock.
There’s a nice photo of long range transport of Saharan dust here: APOD; Mar 3, 2000. Saharan clouds dump spores on the Caribbean.
The particles in the article look a lot like fungal spores. I’d not be to surprised to find that there are environmental conditions under which some fungus or other produces lots of DNA free minicells.
For example, by Peter Gabriel in 1986.
And yet the incredibly obvious step of asking people why they don’t find evidence convincing enough is too hard? Is it really better to assume they’ve got their heads in the sand than to read sunfish’s most recent 3 posts or the like?
These articles
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/exclusives-nfrm/060104_specks1.htm
say microbiologists are looking into it. I don’t know what the findings are yet.
What about algae, scooped up from a body of water (just like frogs/fish get scooped up and dropped)?
[Tagos & Sunfish**
Thank you both, but damn it! I really wanted that to pan out. Oh well. As an OBTW, I agree that the bat idea was extremely odd and seems amazingly unlikely.
Thanks again
Testy
That idea has been looked into. However there isn’t any DNA in the celllike structures, and the rain patterns do not seem to imply that it was caused by an earthbound object being absorbed into the atmosphere then dropped back down.
Wesley, a word to the wise - I would strongly suggest that if you want to continue to track this story, you should wait to hear conclusions from a biologist. Louis and Kumar’s explanation requiring the rainfall pattern to be related to an incoming meteor strike does not have terribly strong ties to reality. In any case, rainfall patterns here don’t preclude an earthly origin for biological materials. Things like algae can in fact become aerosolized (converted to air-borne particles) along with sea spray, and then transported for some distance.
At this time, all that anyone can say is that the material isolated from the red rain samples might have some biological potential which is as yet undetermined. The Guardian article that you linked to, Wesley, carries this correction at the top (bolding mine):
If the biologist now working with the samples isn’t comfortable making a statement at this time, then we ought to maintain some skepticism.
I also just noticed that the same article mentions Louis “gathering samples left over from the rains.” This brings up yet another issue. The samples were left over, how? In puddles? Cisterns? Barrels? The paper itself is vague on this subject, yet another sign of sloppiness. If the newspaper statement is actually true and not some misconveyance of information by the reporter, then we have the additional problem of potential “contamination” of the red rain samples by earthly life that has not been addressed by Louis and Kumar.
Really, this is one situation where Occam’s razor is very appropriate.
Follow-up.
The frustrating thing about these kinds of reports is that there is never any follow-up. I don’t mean on the science, that sounds like it is getting done although I wish it were faster.
The problem is that after the biologists have checked into this stuff and found that it is bat-blood, algae, iron-rust or other perfectly ordinary substance, no one ever hears of it. I’m sure that this is the fault of the media, after all:
“Perfectly ordinary rain of rusty water discovered in Kerela!”
is not really a great headline.
Without feedback, the impression left in everyone’s mind is that the science wasn’t done. I occasionally think this is the cause of all the conspiracy theories about researchers covering-up some incredible discovery.
Regards
Testy
