Iron ‘blueberries’ may be sign of microbial life on Mars | Hacker News Reader

Iron ‘blueberries’ may be sign of microbial life on Mars

lifescientist.com.au

44 pointsyogrish6 comments

There is also an alternate explanation that was replicated in the lab: http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050325blueberr...

    He obtained a quantity of hematite and 
    blasted it with an electric arc. 
    The results are seen in the right 
    half of the image above. The embedded 
    spheres created by the arc appear to 
    replicate many of the features of the 
    blueberries on Mars. No other laboratory 
    process has achieved a similar result.

Well...

1) The article that started this thread links to an abstract of a paper which claims to have pretty compelling evidence for a relationship between mico-organisms and connections, and appears in a pretty respectable journal.

2) The site you link to... how to put it kindly... reads like a bunch of cranks. Seriously, go poke around in there; they link the plasma-arc thing because it supports their "Electric Universe" ideas, and they use it as a vehicle to push that. And their link to the paper about it is 404, so I can't actually verify it, but it's a "presented at", not a "published in", which is a red flag.

Thanks for pointing that out and putting it kindly.

In case anyone is interested in spotting any further red flags with the idea, here is a similar paper by Ransom on craters and spherules: http://www.benthamscience.com/open/toaaj/articles/V004/SI016...

"(But geologists have shown that the more a guess is repeated, the more it’s apt to be called a fact.)"

Heh.

Anyway, the blueberries have come up again the last couple of weeks as Opportunity has just run into new rocks with similar little round things in abundance. Maybe not exactly the same things, but similar.

You can see some of the new ones on the rocks here: http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity_p3062.html

Microscopic Imager of some of them here: http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity_m3064.html

It seems like everything we see "could be proof of life on Mars". It's great there's excitement, but it would be even better if the media didn't cry wolf every time.

Could someone please explain to me how such conditions could be present on the surface of mars or the deserts here on planet earth to trigger the same results as the lab results?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com