24 October 2006
Did Viking find life on Mars? In 1977, NASA answered no, even though at both Viking landing sites the three biological experiments yielded positive responses.... And in many simulations prior to the mission, such results were never false. But another Viking experiment detected no organics in Mars' soil. Favoring that result, NASA decided that life had not been unambiguously detected and came up with an ad hoc explanation (hydrogen peroxide in the soil) for the positive responses in the biology experiments.

Atacama Desert

Gil Levin, who designed the most sensitive of Viking's life-detection experiments, noted right away that NASA's organics experiment was less sensitive than his by 4 or 5 orders of magnitude. NASA knew, in fact, that the organics instrument could not detect the organics in Escherichia coli unless there were more than 10^6 cells per gram of soil. Levin's Labelled Release experiment could detect as few as 50 cells.

Now an international, interdisciplinary team has retested the Viking organics detection system against soils obtained from Mars-like deserts on Earth — soils known to contain organics. Heating the soils to 500°C, as was done on Mars, they saw no organics in 11 of 14 cases. Therefore, the question of whether organic compounds exist on the surface of the planet Mars was not conclusively answered by the organic analysis experiment carried out by the Viking Landers. In other words, Viking may well have found life on Mars.

21 October 2006
Bacteria deep underground subsist on radioactivity. Scientists from nine collaborating institutions went 2.8 kilometers deep near a South African gold mine where they found a community of bacteria distantly related to Firmicutes. The bacteria had been isolated there somewhere between three and 25 million years. Hydrogen that they need for respiration comes from water decomposed by radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and potassium. Radioactivity also drives the production of sulfur compounds that provide the bacteria with a high-energy diet. These sulfate reducers were sustained by geologically produced sulfate and hydrogen at concentrations sufficient to maintain activities for millions of years with no apparent reliance on photosynthetically derived substrates. Members of the team speculated that life might exist in similarly extreme conditions even on other worlds. It raises the possibility that organisms could survive even on planets whose surfaces have long since become lifeless.

21 September 2006
The Conference on Cosmic Dust and Panspermia honored the completion of Chandra Wickramasinghe's 33-year-long tenure of a professorship at the University of Cardiff and brought together researchers in areas of science that appear to have a bearing on the concept of panspermia. A majority of participants stood for a photo on the steps of the School of Mathematics, Friday, 8 September 2006.

1 David Tepfer. 2 Max Wallis. 3 Don Jewett. 4 Patrick McCafferty. 5 Richard Hoover. 6 Brig Klyce. 7 Olivia Temple. 8 Janaki Wickramasinghe. 9 Robert Temple. 10 Shirwan Al-Mufti. 11 Chandra Wickramasinghe. 12 Mark Burchell. 13 S Ramadurai. 14 Barry DiGregorio. 15 Gil Levin. 16 Godfrey Louis. 17 Athem Alsabti. 18 Bill Napier. 19 Steve Coulson. 20 Martin Line. 21 Yogesh Shouche. 22 Tom van Flandern. 23 Victor Clube. 24 Nori Miyake. Not pictured: Mike Baillie, Anthony Campbell, Milan Ćirković, Steve Eales, Siegfried Franck, Karen Junge, Benny Peiser, Jonathan Tate, Milton Wainwright, John Watkins, Anil Wickramasinghe, Priya Wickramasinghe, Ken Woodhouse.

2 August 2006
Chandra Wickramasinghe discusses the red rain of Kerala in a online interview. The red rain fell along the southwest coast of India from July to September 2001, following a sonic boom believed to have been caused by a meteor airburst. Its red color came from microscopic red cells in the rainwater. Their source and nature are uncertain.

1 August 2006

Akilia Island rock sample

The case for life on Earth 3.8 billion years ago has been reinforced by a team of scientists from UCLA and the University of Colorado. Two members of the team, T. Mark Harrison and Stephen J. Mojzsis, participated in a study ten years ago claiming that rocks from Greenland's Akilia Island contained isotopic evidence for life so old. Sceptics soon challenged that study, and the evidence was carefully revisited. The new research is a comprehensive response to the critics, Harrison said.

3 July 2006
Segmental duplications are crucibles of evolution, diversity and disease, say pathologist Jeff Bailey and geneticist Evan Eichler. Their review analyzes these "SDs", or copy repeats, in depth, mainly in the primate lineage. Among primate SDs there is evidence for three categories, pericentromeric, interstitial and subtelomeric. Each, in general, was duplicated in a different time window. SDs make up 13.7% of the human genome, the highest percentage among all sequenced genomes.

Of interest to us, the researchers observe, The duplication of genomic sequences is one of the primary mechanisms for the creation of new genes... by adaptive evolution, gene fusion or exon exaptation. Gene fusion and exon exaptation are consistent with the evolutionary mechanism we endorse on this website. The first mechanism, adaptive evolution (accelerated, non-synonymous point mutations), would uphold strict darwinism, if it can produce new genetic programs. But can it? The only example we found mentioned in this review was the expansion of gene families with related, not new, functions. It appears to us that adaptive evolution by itself only explores and optimizes within narrow ranges. If so, the mainstream theory of evolution still lacks a convincing account for new genetic programs.

We highly recommend the review by Bailey and Eichler.