Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites? No.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacter.php

by araneae • 15 years ago

134 62 15 years ago

jagtesh2• 15 years ago

The author of the published paper in question is the Astrobiology Group Leader at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (http://spie.org/x17397.xml)

Why would he risk his career and put his reputation at stake?

araneae• 15 years ago

shrug

Michael Behe did good work as a microbiologist and publishes in the Journal of Creation. I'm sure this guy really believes it.

ffumarola2• 15 years ago

He has made similar claims before that didn't pan out. Why is it risking his career if he truly believes it? It may just be a case of seeing what he wants to see.

We'll see!

jagtesh2• 15 years ago

My point is, why would NASA employ him as a Group Leader if he were, dare I say, delusional?

There's got to be some truth in it.

gus_massa• 15 years ago

Copying a comment of jneal: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2292467

  This guy has some interesting information:

http://m.gawker.com//5777460/fox-news-publishes-fake-exclusi....

  Something seems odd here - the guy has made this same announcement in the past.

---------------

Some additional research from myself:

The link says that this is not the first time that Hoover made an announcement like this. So I tried to find some of them and got these:

1997: http://www.panspermia.org/hoover.htm

2004: http://www.panspermia.org/hoover2.htm

and: http://www.panspermia.org/hoover3.htm

2010: http://www.panspermia.org/hoover4.htm

(And just to be sure, the older of the articles is in Internet at least from 1998: http://web.archive.org/web/19981202091131/http://www.pansper... )

nollidge2• 15 years ago

It wouldn't be the first time a smart, accomplished person has espoused a weird belief. See Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer: http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscie...

recluce• 15 years ago

But I want to believe :(

_wp3r3• 15 years ago

P.Z. Meyers is a biology Shock Jock. Thats all. He says whatever will get traffic.

ihodes• 15 years ago

Is he wrong?

_wp3r3• 15 years ago

Should be, JOC has 5000 scientist reviewing, and 500 vetting.

SoftwareMaven2• 15 years ago

It seems telling to me that NASA had a major build up and press conference to discuss findings of exobiotic-like life, yet quietly does nothing for evidence of actual exobiotic life.

xd2• 15 years ago

do you mean xenobiotic?

SoftwareMaven2• 15 years ago

No, I didn't, but that would be appropriate, too. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/exobiology

And I would love to know what I was down-voted for. Please tell me it wasn't because somebody thought it really should be xenobiology (and, no, xd, I don't think it was you :).

ffumarola2• 15 years ago

http://journalofcosmology.com/

Not to judge a book by its cover, but... seriously?

Read_the_Genes• 15 years ago

This journal is going under:

http://daviddobbs.posterous.com/journal-of-cosmology-going-o...

From Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/fy4w5/journal_of_co...

I think it is safe to ignore articles published in this journal.

pbhjpbhj• 15 years ago

I thought, trying to be charitable - "it's [http://journalofcosmology.com/] not that bad, OK - not the worst, table based, outset borders, kinda minimalist maybe". Then \BAM\ the background loaded and assaulted my visual cortex.

jarin4• 15 years ago

While it is strange that he would publish his paper in the Journal of Cosmology, it doesn't change the validity (or non-validity) of the facts. I'm looking forward to seeing some serious analysis of the paper instead of snarky ad hominem attacks like this article.

SpikeGronim4• 15 years ago

Yeah, it opens with snark. But then the article goes through the arguments and figures in the paper and refutes the hypothesis, so it's not empty snark.

Publishing a paper in a fake journal does damage the validity of the claims. Papers with sufficient evidence for their claims can get published in journals with strict peer review policies. By choosing such a crap journal the authors are essentially admitting that Nature or Science would never accept their arguments.

jarin4• 15 years ago

The only objective criticisms I saw in the article were about the SEMs not being to scale and the preservation state of the "organisms". Other than that, it seems like it was snark at the beginning, snark in the middle, and snark at the end.

Alex39174• 15 years ago

"Papers with sufficient evidence for their claims can get published in journals with strict peer review policies."

Do you have any evidence that this is actually true?

aneth• 15 years ago

It does, however, change the validity of the "peer reviewed" status the paper has received, and thereby undermines the entire reason this paper has gotten so much attention.

If the journal is not credible, has published unreliable science in the past, has a stated agenda, and does not have an above-board peer-review process, then it is no more worthy of trust than the World News Daily.

Undermining the credibility of the journal a paper is published in is fair game when the credibility of the journal is the only reason any credibility is assigned to the paper.

jarin4• 15 years ago

I think the fact that it has any credibility at all is more due to the fact that the author works at NASA.

Again, I'm not saying that the paper is any good. I'm just saying that people should refute the claims in the paper instead of attacking the delivery method.

Almaviva• 15 years ago

I've seen some surprising things claimed on the cover of the National Enquirer. I hope that they are investigated seriously rather than dismissed with a snarky tone, because if Elvis is really alive on the Moon it would have profound cross-disciplinary implications.

archgoon4• 15 years ago

>While it is strange that he would publish his paper in the Journal of Cosmology, it doesn't change the validity (or non-validity) of the facts.

It effectively does. Suppose the author had good, convincing evidence of bacterial life. He wouldn't send the data to a third rate journal.

bermanoid• 15 years ago

Tossing on my Bayesian hat for a moment...

The journal that a paper is published in should absolutely affect our assessment of the facts in it - if the journal tends to publish only bullshit, we should mark any article that appears in that journal with a pretty high bullshit factor. That's not to say that it can't be overcome, but it's still a mark against.

I'd personally argue that the a priori likelihood of us finding a rock that fell to earth from outer space that happens to contain bacteria inside it (given that we know life is relatively rare) is so low that, coupled with the shady journal it's published in, the claim is so extraordinary that it would be very difficult to provide certain enough evidence to make me think it's true. As in, I'd probably put the probability that this is a straight up fraudulent hoax higher than the probability that this is actually true evidence of alien life.

xd2• 15 years ago

"consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s"

Is it just me or is that comment just a tad childish? I'm finding it hard to take this guy seriously, let alone the other guy.

metachris• 15 years ago

That was exactly the point where I stopped reading -- upvoted.

jarin4• 15 years ago

Yeah, just like every university website ever.

Case in point: a couple of weeks ago I was building a web-based tool under contract for conducting studies for a university's psychology department. I sent them over a functional prototype with a note that I hadn't done any design work on it yet, and they were blown away. Some direct quotes: "that looks amazing." and "we love it".

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

Making comments like that is part of the shtick

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shtick

of PZ Myers when he writes blog posts. Most of his conduct in writing posts on his blog would not be considered civil or decorous conduct here on HN, but he knows his biology, and his reply to the biological aspects of the recently reported claim should be taken seriously. PZ Myers also had one of the first good analyses on the Web of the claim that a different scientist affiliated with NASA had found an "arsenic-based" life form. Not so, as PZ aptly pointed out.

Anyway, PZ continues in his blog post to write, "So let's look at the paper, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus." He then comments that he can't even count on links to the website for the article staying valid, because of the way the website is administered, but he proceeds to analyze the content of the paper, and to find it below the usual standard of biology papers about newly discovered microorganisms.

In other words, it is not always valid in either direction to judge a message by its messenger or its medium. Sometimes good factual points are made with less than ideal decorum.

waterlesscloud• 15 years ago

"In other words, it is not always valid in either direction to judge a message by its messenger or its medium."

Even though that's precisely one of the things the author does.

vog3• 15 years ago

It seems to be that you apply double standards here.

On the one hand, you say that the ugliness of a website doesn't matter, it should be taken seriously nevertheless.

On the other hand, you don't take an article seriously because it contains superficial statements.

I mean, ranting is just another kind of ugliness, on language level instead of the graphical level. It's a bad first impression, that's all. I find it strange to apply different standards to both kinds of ugliness.

Groxx3• 15 years ago

There are still major differences between the two, however.

Visual ugliness is often either an intrinsic quality of something or comes from a lack of effort to improve the visual quality.

Ad hominem attacks, on the other hand, are at best fallacious - they're simply illogical at their core. At worst they're signs of someone spending effort to decrease something else's appeal, in a way that is both wrong and simply mean. It's a net decrease of quality in every single way.

tocomment• 15 years ago

By the way, why does everyone seem to be poo-pooing that arsenic discovery from a few months ago? Did something about it turn out to be fake?

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

Pretty much everything about the "arsenic-based life" claim turned out to be examples of poor scientific lab technique and poor thinking. There is NOT acceptance in the scientific community that arsenic-based life has been found.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/its_not_an_arseni...

http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-ba...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/arsenic-life-under...

http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/

fullduplex• 15 years ago

I read the paper in it's entirety today.

Hoover is a sharp scientist and he has authored a very compelling piece that on the surface appears to reinforce it's central tenant - that the structures documented are not indigenous to Earth.

If that is in fact validated, the remaining debate is about methods and interpretation of the ESEM, FSEM and EDS results. That portion of the paper appears to be very well thought out and presented.

What's also very good, there is a clear and concise method for reproducing the results and the invitation of so many others to do just that.

This thing has legs.

shareme2• 15 years ago

Carl Sagan once fought for the right and asked that it be treated as an honor or duty that every scientist examine claims no matter how unrealistic in order to expose the greater amount of people to the scientific method and basic science. Carl Sagan's debunking of Velikovsky was just as snarky if not more so.

For those of ill-uniformed..Velikovsky had similar theories.

shareme2• 15 years ago

Both sides of the Carl Sagan and Velikovsky affair:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/velikovsky.htm

Some interesting reading as Velikovsky also was a Hoyle believer..

dools• 15 years ago

At first while I was reading this article I was really REALLY bummed out. I was so excited when they discovered extra terrestrial life that, even though the initial link posted on HN came from Fox News and the second came from Yahoo!, I still believed it. I'm just that big an optimist.

This guy put me in my place, though. The Journal of Cosmology does look like a complete and utter joke of a website. Fox may as well just take to syndicating Nexus magazine.

It's not all bad news though! Just as I was beginning to get seriously down in the dumps I saw that, NO JOKE, I'm the 999,999th visitor to scienceblogs.com!

Not only that, but I have been RANDOMLY SELECTED to become the possible winner of an Apple product! That news really bouyed my spirits!

In all seriousness: if this dude wants to go round shitting on other people's websites he should reconsider his choice in 3rd party ad network.

Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites? No.

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