'Alien Life' Story of Dubious Provenance Goes Viral 62
Sockatume writes "By now you have likely read about the 'alien life forms' discovered in the upper atmosphere over Yorkshire, via the mass media reprinting a press release from the University of Sheffield. Unfortunately, the paper comes from researchers with an infamous tendency to identify inanimate objects as aliens, and is published in a journal that seems to principally exist to print unlikely astrobiological claims. Phil Plait points out flaws in a number of their claims. Quoting: 'They found what appears to be a fragment of a frustrule, the hard outer casing around a diatom. It certainly does look like one. But is it? Weirdly, they apparently didn’t even check. Seriously, in the paper they describe the photo of the object and say [emphasis mine], "On one stub was discovered part of a diatom which, we assume, is clear enough for experts on diatom taxonomy to precisely identify." That implies very strongly they didn’t ask an expert in diatoms to look at their sample. That’s bizarre. If I were claiming this were an ET plant, that’s the very first thing I’d do!'"
There could be a more mundane explanation. (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a diatom, but that's not enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it is a diatom. A broken piece of a frustule of one. Judging from the morphology it looks like a pennate species [wikipedia.org], although which one it is would take some work to figure out.
But why people would think finding a bit of a diatom either high in the atmosphere or as a subsequent contaminant sitting on top of your SEM stub during analysis, I have no idea. The things are fricking *everywhere* in ordinary dust from natural sources. They are also commonly used for filtration and other industrial purposes ("diatomaceous earth"). I've even seen them in drinking water samples, either somehow managing to get through the regular filters or perhaps from the filters themselves. Earthly contamination is very, very likely, and it makes no sense to consider this example as anything but. Saying a species of diatom is from space is a sloppy and nonsensical conclusion.