17 October 2010

India's Red Rain of Commet Origin?

India's Red Rain Contained Life Not Seen on Earth - (Herald Sun - September 3, 2010)
Cells from India's red rain of 2001 multiply under extreme heat - and they don't contain DNA. The first theories to emerge were that it was simply sand or dust picked up from a desert, but a local physicist, Godfrey Louis, found that under a microscope, the water contained cells that looked like bugs. Five years later, he published a theory suggesting the bugs that turned the rain red in India may have come from a comet that exploded above the Earth and seeded clouds. The cells - inert at room temperature - begin to reproduce at 121C. While many spores on Earth can survive that kind of extreme heat, none have yet been discovered that can reproduce in those conditions, much less require it to begin reproducing. The only other lifeforms that occur or Earth without DNA are "prions", best known as the cause of Mad Cow Disease.

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