Sunday, August 20, 2006
Red rain in Kerala - conference on it in September
Five years ago in July 2001, Kerala residents said they heard a loud boom. Then red rain fell, which stained white clothes. News of the red rain mystery reached Dr. Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala. He collected many test tubes full of the red-colored rainwater and put some of the odd liquid under a microscope. He was struck by the beautiful rust color of what seemed to be living cells. The cell diameters averaged 10 microns, a little bigger than a human blood cell, which is about 7 microns.
IMO it sounds like it could be most peculiar and may indeed be worth further study. David Lloyd, the Cardiff, UK lab director organising some studies of it, thought it could contain some form of yeast cells, but that idea apparently still leaves some open ended questions.
Another take: "There is a discovery in rainwater that fell on the southwestern tip of India in the state of Kerala, which is challenging the idea that all DNA in this universe is the same."
This so-called "red rain" does occur occasionally, and it is said that red rain (apparently unanalyzed) has fallen in the past in other places like Mongolia and Japan. There still is no definitive confirmation of DNA, or what makes the cell walls red.
In mid-September 2006, Prof. Wickramasinghe (of the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe theories) will host 30 astrobiologists from around the world at Cardiff University, including Dr. Godfrey Louis, who is flying in from Kerala, India, to present his research on the red rain cells since 2001.
http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=1129&category=Science
http://www.astrobiology.cf.ac.uk/redrain.html
http://education.vsnl.com/godfrey
IMO it sounds like it could be most peculiar and may indeed be worth further study. David Lloyd, the Cardiff, UK lab director organising some studies of it, thought it could contain some form of yeast cells, but that idea apparently still leaves some open ended questions.
Another take: "There is a discovery in rainwater that fell on the southwestern tip of India in the state of Kerala, which is challenging the idea that all DNA in this universe is the same."
This so-called "red rain" does occur occasionally, and it is said that red rain (apparently unanalyzed) has fallen in the past in other places like Mongolia and Japan. There still is no definitive confirmation of DNA, or what makes the cell walls red.
In mid-September 2006, Prof. Wickramasinghe (of the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe theories) will host 30 astrobiologists from around the world at Cardiff University, including Dr. Godfrey Louis, who is flying in from Kerala, India, to present his research on the red rain cells since 2001.
http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=1129&category=Science
http://www.astrobiology.cf.ac.uk/redrain.html
http://education.vsnl.com/godfrey
# posted by uv : 2:46 AM
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