World Science is running a story about a paper currently under review entitled 'The red rain phenomenon of Kerala and its possible extraterrestrial origin', which can be read here.

This paper says that Kerala in India experienced 'red rain' for a period of 2 months following an airburst meteorite, and the authors believe that the dust causing the discolouration is in fact extraterrestrial microbes.

The particles certainly look like cells of some kind, and under the microscope they show familiar cellular structures like cell walls, a detatched inner cell, and a thin layer of mucus surrounding the cell. The cell's major constituents are carbon and oxygen, making up about 94%, followed by nitrogen, silicon, iron, sodium, aluminium and chlorine.

However, no DNA or RNA could be detected in the cells, and they have no obvious 'nucleus'. There also seems to be some doubt over wether the particles actually came from the meteorite!

I'm not sure if this is the right forum to post this in, but general opinion seems to be against these guys so I'm hoping it will generate some interesting discussion

The question then becomes, can they get these objects to exhibit any lifelike behavior at all? From reading that I'm not seeing the case for these actually being cells, rather than just being small nodules of organic materials.

Hum,
i suppose that they discounted Red China?

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`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

I don't buy it. If it was extraterrestrial why was it still falling over the same region sporadically for 2 months. If some of it could hang in the air that long, the wind would have carried it over other areas. Had to be a local source.

First, August, 2001, Indian Express: Red rain was fungus, not meteor

Later, June 2003, The Telegraph, Calcutta: Red rain sparked by Gulf dust cloud

The cited paper came out days ago and raises some questions. I await the answers. That the red rain was seen over the course of as much as 60 days I think argues strongly against an atmospheric origin. I would think there's gotta be a source from Earth's surface somewhere and the particles were transported by wind. It's difficult to conceive of an atmospheric source sitting over the Kerala region for a couple months, slowly dropping the particles.

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Right, that seems to be a strong reason to question an extraterrestrial origin. That aside, the "red rain" phenomenon is well documented in the cited paper and may be an unexplained phenomenon worthy of investigation. The red component in the rain appears to be diatom-like particles lacking DNA.

This website cites numerous historical cases of "red rain" that have been described by scientists as diatom-like particles. In a journal search at JSTOR I found two historical reports. The first (in Science, New Series, Vol. 10, No. 257, 1899) cites an 1896 report of red rain from the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science. In that case "red rain" reportedly "fell over Melbourne and much of Victoria on December 27, 1896." It notes that while the red content appeared to be volcanic-rock soil, "Under the microscope the presence of diatoms, scales of lepidoptera, quartz and granet were detected."

The second historic report I found (in Past and Present, No. 166. Feb 2000) incidentally mentions: "[...] on one occasion in 1914 he comments on a report of a shower of red rain in the Jiangsu town of Songjiang. This report was in the back pages of Shenbo, in small print, and in the local news section, all of which related to towns far away in Jiangsu and Zhejiang."

My off-the-cuff hunch is that the red diatomic cell-like component in the rain may originate from the ocean, drawn up by convection or water spouts. Many (if not all) historic cases of red rain were close to an ocean. For example, the documented cases in India were all right next to the Arabian Sea. Furthermore, in the historic cases I cite above, both Melbourne and Victoria are along the Indian Ocean, while Jiangsu runs along the Yellow Sea. ~Ian

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Goddard's Journal

Its an old theory that Worldwide rainfall is
corelated with the major meteor showers. And its
an old idea of mine to pass the rain coming
down from house gutters under magnets to see
if some iron content can be found. Perhaps
some university somewhere is indeed trying to
find whats in raindrops as the drop is
supposed to form around some particulate in the
first place!

Oh no... Nancy picked up on this one.

Interesting.
Anyone know what the difference between "DNA" and "DNA, per se" is?

Grant Hutchison

I will tell you that from reading lots of foreign news sources on the net you'd be amazed at how many totally absurd stories get into print. I don't want to condemn 3rd world countries but when you read in the India Times, for example, that a woman supposedly gave birth to a frog, and it's reported as real news, not the National Enquirer type of news, you get a different perspective on what people believe around the world.

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She said DNA per se isn't required for life. That's true in that we have RNA life forms but those are all viruses and viruses require cells to reproduce and those cells require DNA.

Nancy, of course, being the expert that she is, knows that there is life in the Universe that none of the rest of us know about.

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Sure. But if she'd said DNA isn't required for life, she'd have been saying the same thing, I think. I'm just interested in how pointlessly popular "per se" has become, as a bit of verbal decoration.

Grant Hutchison

I think "per se" is just a way of achieving wiggle room, like saying "to the best of my recollection" when in court. Hardly anyone, including me, knows its latin origin or what it is really supposed to mean. Latin scholars?

"by itself" (through itself)

We use it more as "at all costs/really" in Belgium, like in "did you per se need to do that?". Strange.
I think that has its origins in the correct use as in "that is not necessary per se" (I'm translating Dutch here ), where it replaces "op zich" which means "by itself". Only, when stating it as "did you per se need to do that" the meaning changes, and the original meaning of "per se" is lost. Seems to be common misuse . I often use it wrong (if that is wrong). But anyway, if it's used in Belgium it has a function. Possibly the wrong function, but it has a function .

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

In English it's used with its literal Latin meaning: "in itself". So you might say "Well, his letter wasn't defamatory, per se." Inference: the words themselves didn't say anything defamatory, but the context in which they were interpreted might make them defamatory.
But (it seems to me) people sometimes seem to just tack "per se" on to any random noun in order to express vague doubt: "I'm saying this, but maybe I don't really mean it". "DNA per se" seems like a case in point: "DNA" is, as far as I can see, identical to "DNA in itself", in that DNA has no interpretive context that makes it become other than DNA. And on this occasion I can't even see why the writer wants to hedge her bets in this way.

Reminds me of an overheard remark in the hospital corridor: "And she's been told that they'll never be any use to her again. Not as feet."

Grant Hutchison

You can earn money with them

the British Satirical magazine 'Private Eye' runs a column called 'Funny old World' if you get a crazy story included you get £10.

If it involves tragic death, sex or mutilation, so much the better.

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That's interesting. I think I'll look into it. I know lots of stories.

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/

Can't find the column, are you sure it's in that mag.?

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This one went around the world in a day.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Was it a myth?

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Yes.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

That's so fascinating. It's the news media in this case. They hear partial statements and fill in the blanks for their stories. Anyone who's ever read an in depth story they knew the real details of has probably seen the "fill in the blanks but claim they are facts" in action.

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Wow, I'm not sure what to make of this, but it's in a mainstream newspaper.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world...723913,00.html

It's a load of BS. The fact that the red rain fell over the same area for 2 months proves it's a local source. Any source higher in the atmosphere would move, there's this little thing called wind...

Wasn't it 007 who said in "Tomorrow never dies": They print anything these days?

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Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem.

Didn't we have a thread that touched on this a month ago...

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Yes. I've moved the above four posts from Life in Space to the existing thread on the topic.

I would suspect pollution for any red rain in India and the comment by phunk about it being local over time therefore not from high in the atmosphere makes perfect sense.

Any real life from space will be readily recognizable by its distinct DNA. Just as Darwin observed isolated species and found them to be distinct, so will the DNA be from life forms separated from this planet for millions or billions of years.

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If they even have DNA...

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Perhaps the original science team made a mistake when testing for DNA?

Otherwise it's a big deal whether or not it's extraterrestrial in origin (providing they are what they appear to be, cells), because it shows that DNA isn't the only route to travel in the origin of life, perhaps even enlightening us to a second genesis of life on earth.

New Scientist (subscription required) recently published an article on this; one scientist proposed the hypothesis that they may be mammalian blood cells (which have no DNA). But that leaves you wondering why they haven't shriveled up or exploded due to less than ideal salinity levels (or, for that matter, how upwards of 50,000 kg of blood ended up raining on India).

If what Ian Goddard suggests is correct, and these "cells" have an oceanic origin, how do we explain diatoms without DNA? They may be from the ocean, but they might as well be alien. Again, assuming the DNA tests was properly done.

Perhaps I'm missing something. It's just that my instinctive reaction is cells + absence of DNA = Waaah?

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Curiously enough, under absorption spectrum analysis, the publishers of the paper found the major absorption peak at 505 nm (read UV-visible spectrum here), which just happens to be around the maximum radiation wavelength of the Sun.

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