Red rain is coming down…
Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me…

— Peter Gabriel, ‘Red Rain’

In 2001, Kerala residents heard a sonic boom in the sky followed by two months of mysterious red rain. A physicist in Kerala took samples of the downpour and found what looked like cells without DNA. He believes that the material came from a meteor which exploded while aloft and speculates that the specimens were aliens hitching a panspermic ride. He’s pretty sure they aren’t red earth in pouring rain (thanks, masale.wallah):

On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people’s clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.

Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. ‘If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.’ Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001…

Dr. Godfrey Louis has just released these magnified images of the cells in a new paper in Astrophysics and Space Science (via Digg).

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A new story in Nature reiterates that an Indian-American nuclear scientist’s claims of tabletop fusion are suspect (thanks, Saheli):

Dr. Rusi Taleyarkhan

Several Purdue researchers said Rusi Taleyarkhan, a Purdue professor of nuclear engineering, has stymied their attempts to verify or refute aspects of his controversial “bubble fusion” experiments since late 2003, when he joined Purdue’s faculty. In an article published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, they said their confidence in his work at Purdue and previously at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has been seriously shaken…

Seth Putterman, a professor of physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who received a $350,000 grant from the Defense Department to try to reproduce Taleyarkhan’s findings, said he has been unable to do so. [Link]

In February 2005, the BBC commissioned a collaboration between Seth Putterman and Ken Suslick (two leading sonoluminescence researchers) to reproduce Taleyarkhan’s work. Using similar acoustic parameters, deuterated acetone, similar bubble nucleation, and a much more sophisticated neutron detection device, the researchers could find no evidence of a fusion reaction. This work was reviewed by a team of four scientists, including an expert in sonoluminescence and an expert in neutron detection, who also concluded that no evidence of fusion could be observed. [Link]

Taleyarkhan’s paper had skeptics from the beginning — this excerpt is from 2002:

However, many scientists remain sceptical of the results reported by Rusi Taleyarkhan and his colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, including other researchers at ORNL who tried and failed to repeat the experiments.

The second ORNL team say they used a more sophisticated detection system. But team member Mike Saltmarsh says: “Our experiment saw no evidence for nuclear fusion. This does not prove that no nuclear fusion is going on – it’s virtually impossible to prove a negative – but it does show that if it exists, it is at a very low level…” [Link]

You have all most likely heard of the Kennewick Man:

In 1996, there was a boat race on the Columbia River, near Kennewick, in Washington State, in the extreme northwestern United States. Two fans pulled ashore to get a good viewpoint of the race, and, in the shallow water at the edge of the bank, they found a human skull. They took the skull to the county coroner, who passed it to archaeologist James Chatters. Chatters and others went to the Columbia and retrieved a nearly complete human skeleton, with a long, narrow face suggestive of a person of European descent. But the skeleton was confusing to Chatters; he noticed that the teeth had no cavities and for a 40-50 year old man (the most recent studies suggest he was in his thirties), the teeth were extremely ground down. Cavities are the result of a corn-based (or sugar-enhanced) diet; grinding damage usually results from grit in the diet. Most modern people don’t have grit in their food, but do consume sugar in some form and so do have cavities. And Chatters spotted a projectile point embedded in his right pelvis, a Cascade point, normally dated between 5,000 and 9,000 years before the present. It was clear that the point had been there while the individual was alive; the lesion in the bone had partially healed. Chatters sent off a bit of the bone to be radiocarbon dated. Imagine his astonishment when he received the radiocarbon date as over 9,000 years ago. [Link]

The cover of Time Magazine this week is dedicated to new discoveries about the Kennewick Man reported inside. For many years his remains were the subject of a heated court battle. Native Americans claimed that they had the right to reclaim and bury his remains (thereby preventing scientific study) because he was one of their own. The Time Magazine article (subscription currently required) explains how forensics reveals that the Kennewick Man was not racially what we would consider Native American, but rather Polynesian or Ainu. He therefore predates existing Native American tribes. Indolink.com takes it a step further and includes speculation that he may have been from South Asia. It gets tricky because some people use “South Asia” when they really mean “Southeast Asia”:

Now it appears that analysis of Kennewick Man, places him “closer to southern Asians and nearly equidistant to modern Native Americans and Polynesians.”

That’s because the skull “appears to have strongest morphological affinities with populations in southern Asia, and not with American Indians or Europeans in the reference samples” according to one study.

The interpretations by anthropologists Joseph F. Powell and Jerome C. Rose are based on a scientific technique called craniofacial morphometric analysis. It involves detailed study of the shape of the skull and face, using a sophisticated method called multivariate analysis. In some cases, more than 60 different dimensions of a skull are measured and compared with comparable dimensions considered typical of specific racial groups. [Link]

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