Scientifically, this has been a dead issue since 2002. EOS: 83(31): 335. To summarise:

During the rainfall of July 2001 much was collected because water supplies had been disrupted in the area and people left vessels out. Samples were collected by scientists the next day, and when examined revealed many small circular spores. These were allowed to grow in a laboratory medium, and intense growth was observed. The organism was identified as Trentepohlia, a lichen forming algae. The site was revisited on 16 August, and the trees rocks, lamp-posts etc of the area were found to be full of of lichens.Their identity was confirmed as Trentepohlia. Coloured rains (yellow, blue and green) were also reported from elsewhere in the region of a few hundred kilemeters and continued for more than a month until the end of the monsoon season, disproving the cometary event. Various historic reports of previous coloured rain events in the area were also found.

talk about flogging a dead horse...

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plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...

Old, disproved claims never really die, they just go through periods of dormancy... Did you know that evolution was disproved because the missing link has never been found?

... another of hoyles' great contributions to science.

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plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...

Yeah, I'm anxiously awaiting some news on this as well. How long could it take? Supposing the results confirmed an earthly origin, why wouldn't it have been peer reviewed and published by now, two years later?

The final statement on the Cardiff website(last updated Aug.07), I find, is rather ambiguous:

"Further work in progress has yielded positive for DNA using DAPI staining in the cells and daughters. However, this identification is not yet fully confirmed, and might be considered equivocal. We hope to pursue our efforts in extracting DNA (if it exists), amplifying it and carrying out genetic sequencing, but his work takes time."

"Yielded positive" and "(if it exists)"?



Perhaps they're still analysing the "replication cycle not commonly found in bacteria or yeasts."

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

Yeah, this is curious and raises several issues for me: Louis and Kumar, apparently after the identification of Trentepohlia, submitted a series of papers with little or no reference to this which resulted in a published article in a scientific journal. Why should this happen? Wouldn't the identity of Trentepohlia be known by the "peers" after 4yrs? Wouldn't Wichramasinghe and the Cardiff Astrobiology Institute recognize the DNA "(if it exists)" as the strain being from the confirmed algea? Is the replication cycle of Trentepohlia not known to be the lesser common among bacteria and yeasts, and thus further confirming its identity? Why would further study be needed at all?

Moreover, if the algal explanation is the simplest why wasn't this included in the identification as explanation which was published, where's the peer reviewed article explaining the mechanism by which these spores were lifted into the atmosphere and distributed widely over such a period of time? I've read Ian Goddard's conjecture of a self propogating storm but I don't think his is the final scientific say. Do you?

And whether or not you think it's dead or settled, don't stand behind it...

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

A mistake; I would hate to think it was deliberate deception, but that also is possible. After all, Louis and Kumar are not biologists, but a physicist and a computer scientist respectively so they are publishing outside their fields. That might explain why they failed to find DNA when the Cardiff lab was able to detect it.

Did you see the television program which showed the Cardiff lab making the test? They were somewhat disappointed, it seemed to me; certain people seemed to want this material to be of alien origin, and now that it does not look like it is, the whole mattter seems to have been shelved.

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Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense . OA Flickr set

Sure. It will be "unsettled" the moment that someone can provide some E-V-I-D-E-N-C-E that there is something unearthly involved in the red rain.

Simple, no?

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Yes, they laughed at Einstein, but only because of his silly hairstyle; no one was actually laughing at his science.

How to take over the world?

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Fields of Space

LOGIC, n.
The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

In the Year 2525.

"One small step for (a) man. One giant leap for mankind".

If an astronaut doesn't need good grammar, niether does you.

Host of Seraphim

Pinkie, "Yes, but how do we get the mackeral into Abe Vigoda's shorts?"

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

Narf!

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort