Lots of Ink for a few extremophiles: We’ve been invaded by aliens, Monolakians, from the Duncecap Galaxy
.. photo Henry Bortman
I really should have posted on this yesterday, this giant kerfuffle in a few media outlets saying that, maybe possibly sort of, NASA-funded astrobiologists have, wink wink, discovered alien life right here on Earth.
The real news, from a paper in Science about the thoroughly strange metabolism of thoroughly terrestrial, as in “of terra,” microbes in hyperhaline Mono Lake, California, is coming off embargo in a few hours as I write this. Then I’ll add a bunch, tomorrow, of the legit sort. The advance press, triggered by a NASA note to reporters on an upcoming press conference (today) by said astrobiologists, kicked things off. Science’s poobahs declared the first wave of news too, uh, alien to Earthly reality, to compel them to lift the embargo on what the researchers actually think about what they found. (Late addition – mid-morning Thur they did lift the embargo as more and more stories appeared, several of them informed by what the paper does have to say).
But first, the weird versions in the media, largely from the tabloid wing of what once was called Fleet Street but not limited to it. They are daffy enough to satisfy the silly quota without poking through what some bloggers have been snorting around the room with.
- Sun (UK) Paul Sutherland (the “Sun Spaceman): It’s life, but not as we know it / Hope of finding ET-style life on other worlds has gotten a massive boost after scientists discovered microbes in a deadly poisonous ARSENIC lake ; He writes a “second form of life started on Earth in environments previously thought too hostile” and attributed it to a “breakthrough discovery during two years probing Mono Lake in California’s Yosemite National Park.” Well this is so utterly ignorant. How can he write such tripe? Somebody call fact check. Doesn’t everybody know Mono Lake is miles east of Yosemite?
- Daily Mail : NASA raises hopes of finding extra-terrestrials with discovery of ‘alien’ bacteria that survives in arsenic ;
- Atlanta Journal-Constitution – Larry Hartstein: Has NASA found life near Saturn? ; I love it. The NASA tease said it’s about astrobiology, listed the speakers, one blogger (Jason Kottke) connected some dots that took him into deep interplanetary space, and this reporter bites.
- Weekly World News – Tap Vann: NASA’s Big Announcement ; Lede: “Tomorrow, December 2, NASA will announce that they have found evidence of extraterrestrial life on Mars and Jupiter.” Says an invasion is under way. Oh wait. This is labeled satire. Oh darn.
- Examiner.com – Brent McGrady: NASA may have discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life ;
Let’s get right to this flurry’s Grist for the Mill:
NASA Media Advisory NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery ; It’s only hint to actual content, aside from the lineup of speakers: “NASA will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. PST on Thursday, Dec. 2 to discuss an astrobiology finiding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.”
Well! No wonder some people went ape, as in planet of the *.
This storm of speculation got so heated that, without waiting for the embargo to lift and while dancing around the real news being disclosed, a number of reporters decided to debunk the speculation. The spoilsports. I mean, why do such a thing when the public impact is nil? (One scenario - an assignment editor starts screaming we gotta cover this, so the poor reporter who has access to Science magazine’s SciPak with its advance skinny for journalists on the paper is compelled to get out the wet blanket?)
Debunkers in advance of the press conference that’s still under embargo:
- Universe Today: Calm Down: NASA Hasn’t Found any Aliens ;
- AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Fact Check: Speculation feeds flap on alien life ;
- The Week/ The First Post – Tim Edwards: NASA mystery unravels ;
- MSNBC Cosmic Log – John Roach: E.T. found? (False) rumors swirl ;
And, out of the gate first with critical perspective on all this, the Columbia Journalism Review‘s Curtis Brainard got his assessment out yesterday, with plenty of links. He titled it Close Encounters of the Media Kind, which is pretty good.
Tomorrow: We’ll see who has the energy to write the real news after the press conference today sorts through an interesting bit of news, but not as good as life on Titan or someplace like that.
Image above: That’s a JPL rover test, at Mono Lake. The pic ran with a serious article that has nothing do to with arsenic tolerance. In Astrobiology Magazine by Henry Bortman.
- Charlie Petit
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December 2nd, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Thank goodness they lifted the embargo. My eyes were starting to hurt from rolling at all of the hysterical speculation! Gizmodo’s was probably the worst in my opinion — though that’s hardly surprising to me. (http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life)
It will be very interesting to see how the crow is eaten, or if it’s all just left to fade. Nice roundup of the goofiness and the rebuttals.
December 2nd, 2010 at 1:08 pm
Embargo Watch’s post on this (http://embargowatch.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/science-gets-it-wrong-again-my-take-on-the-nasa-astrobiology-paper/) bears repeating here.
What ticks me off about this, as someone who reported on this, was that the researcher in question never responded to me to any phone calls or email requests. This was understandable, given the deluge of requests she said she got because of the completely irresponsible hysterical raving from bloggers and UK tabloids, but only contributed to how the journalists who tried to handle this responsibly could get handicapped without any original reporting whatsoever, save press releases.
December 2nd, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Wow, according to Gizmodo (via Wired) (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/nasa-finds-new-life/), this bacterium “is made of arsenic,” and “doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth.” Except, of course, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and yes, phosphorus, since these microbes started off eating phosphate salts and only later got switched onto an arsenic diet. What utter bollocks.
December 2nd, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Even Dennis Overbye’s piece in the NYT seems overly gushy, with some sentences bordering on silly:
“Redefine Life” (Yes, that’s the hed.)
“using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream about”
“gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic.” (It’s little body?)
“Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist at Columbia University who was not part of the research, said he was amazed. “It’s like if you or I morphed into fully functioning cyborgs after being thrown into a room of electronic scrap with nothing to eat,” he said.” (OK, that’s a quote, but I certainly wouldn’t use it.)
“arsenic-eating organisms” and “taste for arsenic” (Eating? I guess you could say that all bacteria can do is absorb molecules from their environment, so anything they take in is “eaten.” But “eating” implies getting energy from, which isn’t going on here. They didn’t prefer arsenic.)
December 4th, 2010 at 6:57 am
Increasing the monotony of such articles, similarly exotic bacterium has been found over the last decade. There might even be something spectacular living under my fridge, but they wouldn’t know unless they looked there.
Just to clarify, is it alien because they’ve never found it before, or because it might be a part of the tonnes of living material that has been deposited on our atmosphere from space and floats down through the stratosphere?
Maybe they don’t want to talk about it because the Roman Catholic Church wants to oppress the fact that life on earth wasn’t spontaneous.