'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!'"
Re:Who? What? Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
I guess I badly overestimated how much newsreading Slashdot does but it's currently the top Science story on Google News (tragically) and is getting reprinted all over the fuck.
https://news.google.com/news/rtc?ncl=dnKMHzxjFcOnzwM_UbabG5Mw_uKHM&topic=snc&siidp=c91213d6efdc327274530d68fc4346a67566 [google.com]
Re:Who? What? Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
huh? anywhere outside of 100km radius around sheffield it's just taught that england made lots of products industrially and among them steel.
For fine steel products just prior to WWII.. no, sheffield is not the place that comes to mind, not for the century prior to it either. Krupp comes to mind. Of course I suppose that inside UK they wouldn't want to mention that industrial revolution didn't happen just inside UK.
But.. more importantly, why would I read a newspaper that would publish stupid stuff like this? they're trying to say that since they supposedly found pieces of algae in 25km they must have come from space...