India's red rain may contain life not seen on Earth

http://www.news.com.au/technology/panspermia-theorists-say-indias-red-rain-contains-life-not-seen-on-earth/story-e6frfro0-1225913620448

by keyle • 16 years ago

137 67 16 years ago

news.com.au

wallflower• 16 years ago

I know a girl from Kerala. It is a very beautiful place - very lush - from the photos I have seen. I will have to ask her about the Red Rain.

"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)

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0601/0601022v1.pdf

kranner2• 16 years ago

The paper from 2006 (second link above) has very interesting scanning electron microscope pictures of the critters (3D reconstructions).

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

These look quite similar:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microspherulite

train_robber• 16 years ago

I am from Kerala. This was obviously big news when it happened. But on my mind, this was a closed issue a few years back, when it was 'proved' that the colour was due to some algae. I'm a bit surprised by this now, and also surprised that none of the local papers have carried the story.

ggrot• 16 years ago

That is alot of speculation for something that the article says is "rejected by the scientific community at large" and "yet to be verified".

keyle• 16 years ago

It's easier to dismiss theories than nail one...

vecter2• 16 years ago

I guess the question is, why does this theory deserve to not be dismissed? There are (pulling a number out of my ass) tens of thousands of theories on anything and certainly not enough resources to test them all. I think the burden of proof rests with those pushing a new idea. There are people working on this, but without further substantiation, there's nothing special about it.

Twisol• 16 years ago

It's the "panspermia angle" that's "rejected by the scientific community at large", whereas the other findings (i.e. lack of DNA) are "yet to be verified". One step at a time: they may not be able to show extraterrestrial origin, but they have experimental evidence of reproduction at high heat, and an apparent lack of genetic material. If nothing else, those points are _extremely_ interesting.

DanielBMarkham2• 16 years ago

The team's findings are yet to be verified.

Sigh. Nine years, no independent verification. For reproducible incredibly unique behavior like that? Verification of a real phenomenon would be massive and immediate.

marze4• 16 years ago

"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.

DanielBMarkham2• 16 years ago

You've misunderstood me.

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.

carbocation4• 16 years ago

"In a sense, this publication is verification..."

I don't think that Dr. Louis gets to verify his own work.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

> Something involving alien life

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

troymc• 16 years ago

How hard can it be to verify?

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.

ujal2• 16 years ago

"Today Louis, Wickramasinghe and others publish some extraordinary claims about these red cells. They say that the cells clearly reproduce at a temperature of 121 degrees C."

They published it on 1 Sep. 2010. Give them some time.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25699/

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Extraordinary claims require bullet proof evidence, I don't see that here, just a bunch of pretty pictures that could be a whole pile of other things than 'reproducing particles'.

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.

metamemetics• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_rain_in_Kerala#Criticism

Marticus• 16 years ago

To be fair, they published a paper in 2006.

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.

marze4• 16 years ago

Link to the paper:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1008/1008.4960.pdf

vecter2• 16 years ago

  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".

You have got to be kidding me.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

I think you could find a good spectral match for just about anything given the number of stars out there.

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.

jonhendry4• 16 years ago

I think that currently, to get on arxiv you just need some arxiv-trusted person to vouch for your work. The idea being that if you vouch for too many kooks they stop letting you vouch for anyone.

marze4• 16 years ago

Unlikely sounding indeed.

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.

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

Also matches spectrum of left lens of 3D glasses from my movie theatre. Life spontaneously created from cinema!

danilocampos• 16 years ago

I want to believe.

patrickgzill• 16 years ago

I am listening to Peter Gabriel, truly the man is a prophet ... he did a song called "Red Rain" years ago .

mitko• 16 years ago

> While many spores on Earth can survive that kind of extreme heat, none have yet been discovered that can reproduce in those conditions, much less require it to begin reproducing.

Much less than none?

jeromec2• 16 years ago

Replace "much less" with "let alone".

carbocation4• 16 years ago

As I think you're alluding, "much less" is idiomatic English, and is used correctly in the article. Basically, it means "certainly not."

"Let alone" is also idiomatic English so might not clarify things if the parent was unfamiliar with "much less."

bluesmoon• 16 years ago

s/much less/to say nothing of/

It's a common colloquialism that we use in that part of the world.

carbocation4• 16 years ago

>He says the cells - inert at room temperature - begin to reproduce at 121C. ... While many spores on Earth can survive that kind of extreme heat, none have yet been discovered that can reproduce in those conditions, much less require it to begin reproducing.

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?

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

> 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.

jwecker• 16 years ago

Well _I_ thought it was witty enough. cheers (:

gowiththeflow• 16 years ago

"The only lifeforms that occur or Earth without DNA, according to another commentor, are proteins known as 'prions', best known on Earth as the cause of Mad Cow Disease."

I was not aware that prions were considered a lifeform.

Devilboy• 16 years ago

It depends on the definition of 'life' you're using. There's lots of disagreement on what the definition should be exactly.

carbocation4• 16 years ago

There really is nobody arguing that prions are alive. Unlike viruses, for which there is at least a vigorous debate, prions just don't cut it, lacking virtually all of the features that we associate with life.

I can't believe that this news article is quoting from commenters on the technologyreview arxiv blog.

jonhendry4• 16 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, they can 'reproduce' after a fashion, by warping other nearby normal proteins into prions.

zitterbewegung• 16 years ago

If I recall correctly this was properly debunked as false. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_rain_in_Kerala from the article "The color was found to be due to the presence of a large amount of spores of a lichen-forming alga belonging to the genus Trentepohlia"

gaoshan• 16 years ago

I'll second this. I was under the impression that it was spores of a decidedly earthbound variety. I wish it were little extraterrestrial organisms but t does not look to be the case.

anigbrowl6• 16 years ago

I had thought so too, but it's not as simple as the Wikipedia page makes it seem. The report does consider the possibility that the red 'dye' came from a meteorite which is thought to have entered the atmosphere and exploded, but rejected this idea because it was found to be biological (as opposed to mineral). At the time of this report, nobody had suggested any exobiological explanation, so none was considered or refuted. I would be wary of relying so completely on it for a few reasons.

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.

stavrianos• 16 years ago

Uh, guys... you found the rain on earth. This is where you saw it. Just sayin'.

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".

oozcitak• 16 years ago

Occam's Razor?

teilo• 16 years ago

This reads like a Pravda article. Sensationalist and next to no substance.

megablast• 16 years ago

It is news.com.au, a Murdoch paper in Australia. It is as authoritative as a Fox news broadcast.

Revisor• 16 years ago

And it has more than 100 points at HN.

jonhendry4• 16 years ago

So Kerala was repeatedly hit by projectiles from space over a span of months, producing a red rain of alien life.

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?

prodigal_erik• 16 years ago

Relativity tells us that a frame of reference in which both the sun and the rest of the earth orbit Kerala is equally valid.

andrewmu• 16 years ago

I don't believe this is the case for rotation.

superk• 16 years ago

More speculation... but if a comet exploded in the upper atmosphere these microparticles could have been trapped up there for while. Still would expect winds and such to spread them around...

anigbrowl6• 16 years ago

The hypothesis is that the rainfall followed from a single meteoric event, which preceded the first 'red rainfall' by a few hours, with greatest concentrations of red material in the 10 days afterward.

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.

jonhendry4• 16 years ago

" 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.

psiconaut• 16 years ago

the "Growth and replication of red rain cells at 121 oC and their red fluorescence" paper at arxiv does not contain a single reference to the alledgelly-named "cells" lack of DNA (apart from being plagued of obvious spelling errors). If I were them, I wouldn't bother with spectrographic analysis if the real finding is non-dna based life form.

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.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Sokal is a hero for doing that.

javanix• 16 years ago

Is 'all-in boffin barney' a respectable news phrase in Australia?

kenj0418• 16 years ago

Apparently. I think its Australian for kerfuffle.

WalterGR• 16 years ago

I think its Australian for kerfuffle.

Specifically, an argument amongst all scientists.

all-in: involving everyone

boffin: scientist

barney: argument (from rhyming slang: "Barney Rubble" - "trouble")

India's red rain may contain life not seen on Earth

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