Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Panspermia


I've been following this story for a while now and it has all the makings of a great discovery. Or one big disappointment.

Apparently, a rain drenched southern Kerala over several weeks in July 2001 and the oddity was that the rain was red. There has been no convinving explanation as to the origin and nature of this red rain but Mr. Louis, a scientist in Kottayam, collected samples and subjected them to scrunity under a very powerful microscope. Which was when things started to go very strange. The red particles seemed to consist of organic material and looked like a unicellular organism with a distinct cell wall. How do you spell panspermia?

Pictures from his paper can be seen here. His full paper is availabe here. Wikipedia has a balanced article up as well.

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