Mars Express

Wow, that certainly looks like a lot of H2O. After stumbling across this from Science Clarified (specifically the sections 'Oil Eaters' and 'Bioremediation'), I wonder if DNA is coding for organisms or more for an entire ecosystem that's adaptive to any environment that has liquid, minerals, and radiation ... either way, considering the age of the solar system, finding both fossils and life on Mars (and other places) seems more likely than ever ...

But maybe the focus on water and the implied constraints of a "habitable zone" around stars is just an instance of geo-centric thinking. I guess the main function of water as a prerequisite for life is this: it's a solvent. It allows substances to move around more easily both at a very small scale (cell) and on a larger scale (the body of an organism, or around a whole planet). being able to transport substances around is a nice thing if you want to do metabolism :-).

But there are so many substances that could work as a solvent ... maybe each zone around a star has its own "ideal" solvent and we just happen to live in the "water" zone. Maybe there is even a "liquid methane" zone :

http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/astro/seminars/archive/JS09/jcl27Feb09-1.pdf

CU
HB

Wow! He's been sitting on samples for 9 years without 'independent verification' :-) :-)

"unlike any found on Earth" .... whoops ....the scale shows you are looking at 8um red cells, some seen side on with the characteristic pinched waist ( think 'donut' without the hole ) clumping with 2um platelets. I do that every time I bleed.

So a physicist could find "no evidence of DNA" .... ROFL .... yeah, absence of evidence is evidence for the absence .... and of course, since he was trained in that area he'd know, right? Like, I mean, he's been to university hasn't he? 'Cos everybody that goes to uni does a DNA detection course .... that's why he'd know :-) :-)

Sonic booms over India? Like there could be no other reason for that, right ?

"remarkably similar to various unexplained emission spectra", "growing body of evidence", "peer reviewed", "international team" and throw in a famous dead physicist for good measure.

What utter morons. The lot of them. One out of every three of my body cells is a red blood cell. Most don't contain DNA. They did when they were developing in my bone marrow, and for about 7 to 10 days upon movement from there into my general circulation they had a remnant of the nucleus ( which has DNA ). They are called reticulocytes in this phase, and require a special stain to distinguish them from the rest ( so they can be then counted ). When heated the DNA denatures or unravels and will become visible within the cell even in the absence of the special stain. You won't see this at room temperature. The longer you do that the more reticulocytes will be evident, whereas the mature red cells will not change appearance. So much for 'daughter cells appear within the original mother cells'.

During maturation the nucleus of the red cells degrades, DNA and all, leaving a cell chockers full of haemoglobin. As a red cell usually lasts about 90 days on average then these reticulocytes will represent a few percent of my cells at any given time, but subject to turnover eg. have I significantly bled recently? If you put live red cells into pure water they typically swell into a more spherical shape, and yes some can rupture losing their biological actions. If they have been subject to clotting proteins, or are adherent to adjacent platelets, then they generally don't rupture. Destroyed? No. They obviously go into some other hidden dimension and remain undetectable. Call Lisa Randall .....

So would anyone like to suggest what might have caused the red rain after hearing a boom in the sky? What something might have 'disintegrated in the upper atmosphere' ? Something that ticks at least a half dozen boxes on similiarity with mammalian red cells? Something that would 'fluoresce when bombarded with light', indeed quite like what a forensic investigator might discover at a crime scene using a device built for precisely that property - on account of a well known substance that is often left at crime scenes. Something from the Preposterous Constellation perhaps? They're both red, right?

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) Perhaps about as red as some faces ought be at Physics arXiv ...... can you think of why ?? :-)