[luke warm]

they say they've found a giant bacterium in a meteorite

of course this is a fox news link, so it's probably some fundamental religious shill using life found on earth, so this can be discredited at some later time... but if it *is* true, we have nothing to fear... charlie sheen can defeat them with his words only, never mind the fire from his fists

i for one welcome our giant bacterium overlords

[babalu1997]

luke warm, on 2011-March-06, 09:11, said:

they say they've found a giant bacterium in a meteorite

of course this is a fox news link, so it's probably some fundamental religious shill using life found on earth, so this can be discredited at some later time... but if it *is* true, we have nothing to fear... charlie sheen can defeat them with his words only, never mind the fire from his fists

i for one welcome our giant bacterium overlords

when i read the headline i thought the scientists suddenly started to play bridge

[helene_t]

Edit: lol @me. This is embarrassing. Better not edit my post, just acknowledge that USViking is obviously right.

Thanks for posting this, Jimmy. It is very interesting.

The study was first published in 2007. http://www.batse.msf...07/rhoover.html

The peer-reviewed publication is due in the march issue of journal of cosmology. It is available online already:

http://journalofcosm...om/Life100.html

At the moment, only the article itself is available. When the issue becomes available on print, it will contain contributions by peers who have analyzed the material. It will be interesting to see if this time there is widespread support for the claim that there is evidence of life elsewhere in our solar system.

This post has been edited by helene_t: 2011-March-06, 15:58

[Winstonm]

How can they be so sure it's a meteorite? According to the Landover Baptist Church Bigfoot Project, fossilized Sasquatch droppings are high in iron content, and as it is not uncommon to find bacteria in the bowels of mammals, it is much more likely that this bacterial discovery is a confirmation of Sasquatch than evidence of an alien lifeform.

[USViking]

Sigh.

More bugs from the NASA astrobio hype machine.

Here is the entire paper:

http://journalofcosm...om/Life100.html

Here is an early rebuttal:

http://scienceblogs....over_bacter.php

(from link, emphasis added):

Quote

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 … 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. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: "Northern California"), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific "publications" on this web site.

It is not an auspicious beginning. Finding credible evidence of extraterrestrial microbes is the kind of thing you'd expect to see published in Science or Nature, but the fact that it found a home on a fringe website that pretends to be a legitimate science journal ought to set off alarms right there.

I notice the word "peer review" cropping up again in its usual modern form as sort of
an incantation meant to enchant the gullible general reader into thinking well, this
must be a scientific done deal.

What is a done deal is that NASA is off its astrobio rocker again, this time not only
publishing substandard science, but also publishing it in a substandard jounrnal.

I would really like to see budget-cutters of the right, left and center get to work
on the NASA astrobio/(S)ETI department, as in pull the plug on the damn thing,
and let the venture continue under private funding, if it is to continue at all.

[slothy]

In my opinion, the explanation is simply that one of the scientists accidentally sneezed on it in the lab.

[matmat]

Quote

What is a done deal is that NASA is off its astrobio rocker again, this time not only
publishing substandard science, but also publishing it in a substandard jounrnal.

I don't think NASA had much to do with this publication.

[USViking]

Quote

USViking: What is a done deal is that NASA is off its astrobio rocker again, this time not only
publishing substandard science, but also publishing it in a substandard jounrnal.

matmat, on 2011-March-11, 02:42, said:

I don't think NASA had much to do with this publication.

I noticed NASA's speedy disavowal of the paper, and to be fair
I should have posted about it here.

However, it is also fair to point out that NASA culture lacks
detachment and objectivity where astrobiology is concerned,
and this has led them to promote two questionable studies that
I know of, namely the "microbe-bearing" martian metiorite, and
the Mono Lake CA microbe with "arsenic-bearing" DNA.

I guess NASA is never going to give up on the meteorite, as long
as it has been around now. The Mono Lake bug should be another
matter. If the NASA team is as good as its word it ought by now
to be handing out samples of the bug to other scientists. I predict
a null result for all attempts at replication. I wish I could predict
how NASA will handle the disappointment.