apsmith –

    I also wondered the same thing.  As far as I can tell, though, he is a legitimate professor.  He is located in the area where these events have occurred, so I suspect his involvement stems from witnessing these events.

    On a side note, I showed these papers to my botany professor (plant molecular systemics) who agreed that his findings were well investigated and intriguing.  He encouraged me to find out more about these organisms, if possible.

     Does anyone have any futher information on the subject?

Ed

I’m supposed to believe that these fine meteor particles hung around for a month over one small area of India? Enough to dye the rain red?

In just the first couple of paragraphs, the linked article says that the dust was deposited in the clouds. Clouds can hang around for a long time, if the weather is right… and this happened in monsoon season, again according to the article, a time of much rain (and many clouds).

The residence time of water in the atmosphere is about 11 days. Clouds during the monsoon season do not last longer than clouds at any other season, and in fact the rainfall is so great during the monsoon that the atmosphere is quickly scrubbed clean of hydrophilic particles, as they are great condensation nuclei for rain drops to form on. The paper didn’t suggest they were deposited “in the clouds”, merely that they were deposited at various altitudes. How they can remain suspended for months without being displaced laterally is a large flaw in Dr. Louis’s argument.

The paper authors don’t give the concentration of the particles found in the rain water, therefore it is impossible to determine how much material would need to be suspended in the atmosphere. They vaguely refer to there being “thousands of kilograms”.

Their map of the area shows a region approximately 800×200 nautical miles. That’s 1500 km x 370 km = 450000 km^2

A mere 0.03 m (0.00003 km) of rain over this area would be 13.5 km^3 of water.

Now, I want to know how much of their particles you need to turn that much water red.

Google “red rain kerala” and you will see many news articles related to this event, in addition to the page these papers are found on. I don’t know how anything could remain in one locality like that either, but apparently it did. The most recent “official story” is that the redness is caused by fungal spores, but no further details are given through mainstream channels.

This is the latest news i’ve found. It’s a breif article from june of 2003 that seems to say that the red rain was from a dust cloud not fungus.
J-n

The vast bulk of this was written before I read this article submitted by J n. I’m especially pleased that it confirmed my suspicions about dust from over the Arabian Sea and ordinary microbial growth. Enjoy.

The distribution of red rain in time is problematic. Godfrey Louis does a good job of explaining how a 10 micron object can linger in the air for long periods of time but ignores the fact that the same forces that keep it in the air would allow it to be carried great distances by wind. The chances of meteorite fragments drifting down exactly below where they were originally ablated months after the fact are nil. It is telling that the trail of the putative meteorite happens to coincide with the southern end of the west coast of India. The west coast is different from the rest of India. Immediately beyond the coast rises the Western Ghats (in the far south, the Cardamom Hills), which by orogenic uplift wring water out of the prevailing winds coming from over the Arabian Sea. Thus the thin strip of land before this mountain chain is tropical with rain throughout the year, unlike the semi-raid region just to the east. It boasts an extremely high population density due to the favorable climate, and this large population would have been on the lookout after the initial reports of colored rain hit the news. It is thus probable that the phenomenon involves dust from Africa or the Arabian Peninsula getting washed out of the air over the coast, rather than a meteor.

The descriptions I’ve seen of the red rain don’t say whether it was visibly red when it fell or whether it was declared red after it was noticed in standing pools of collected rain. Since the original rain was reported as falling at night, and the standing pools themselves aren’t strongly tinted (meaning individual drops were almost clear), the latter is likely. If so, perhaps nutrients dissolved in the rainwater triggered the growth of a terrestrial microorganism. No mention is made of sample collection methods or of any attempt to isolate individual colonies of the putative space organism. Since many terrestrial organisms have spore forms that persist in the atmosphere, an attempt must be made to isolate the red cells from other more mundane organisms.

Much is made of the absorption properties of red cell solutions in the UV region of the spectrum, to match anomolous UV absorption in space. Real biologists would find this interesting, but since many biological molecules absorb UV, they would be much more interested in the spectral characteristics in the visible portion of the spectrum (consider chlorophyll, carotenoids, hemoglobin, etc.). This is especially true considering the red coloration of the cells. Some component must be absorbing light in the blue-green end of the visible portion of the spectrum. The graphs shown suggest an almost flat absorption in the visible, which would doesn’t explain the red coloration. I’d have preferred to see visible light absorption spectrums of more concentrated samples.

The use of Ethidium Bromide to detect DNA has problems. It has a certain background flourescence, which means there is a minimum detectable concentration which is indistuinguishable from a non-DNA-containing Ethidium Bromide control. It is also interesting that he noted no DNA after grinding the cells, but proudly proclaimed the uptake of Ethidium Bromide by whole cells as evidence of biomolecules. DNA is a long fragile molecule. Perhaps grinding cells is not the best way of preserving it. There’s also the unfortunate fact that the biological world is rife with DNases, whcih like to snip DNA into bitty pieces. Even in the cleanest and most sophisticated biology labs, problems with these are encountered. This might explain the lack of DNA from the original red cells (which had probably already used up the nutrients and thus were mostly dead). And finally, as Godfrey Louis himself noted, DNA is not stable at the pressure and temperatures at which he was ‘growing’ the cells. The other DNA test changed color, but not the expected color. This could mean no DNA, or perhaps it turned the right color but was mixed with a cell component of another color?

Perhaps the most interesting part of the experiments is the alleged cell growth at 300 degrees C. What is happening here is less certain, but I’ll hazard a guess. Lipids such as comprise cell membranes are more water soluble at high temperatures. Dissolution of the membranes resulted, especially with the help of the ‘growth’ media, which contained various oils or alcohols and other strange items. In order to obtain turbidity measurements, though, the culture was depressurized and cooled. Lipid membranes spontaneously reformed, perhaps wrapping around cellular debris. Their size and number would depend on the rate of depressurization and cooling. The cultures were “recovered from the pressure vessel after fast cooling”, so he started with a few large cells and ended up with many small lipid vesicles. Growth indeed.

Physicists tend to think of all other hard sciences as branches of physics. However, they often make bad biologists. Godfrey Louis should go back to studying crystals.

But what about the fact that they metabolize hydrocarbons?

This is just the point I was going to bring up:

How do you account for their metabolism?  Not to mention the observations of their life cycle?

You mean the evidence of metabolic activity provided from the radiolabeled metabolic substrates? Oh, wait, he never did that. He didn’t show that the concentrations of the substrates decreased in the presence of the cells. Nor did he do show any evidence of metabolic waste products resulting from utilization of the substrates. He didn’t even prove that the substrates moved into the cells. All he showed was that a few large cells could be processed into more smaller cells using high heat and pressure, and that’s not necessarily evidence of biological activity, let alone metabolic activity.

…at godfreylouis@vsnl.com . Somebody email him and ask him for an interview.  Or hey, ask him to mail weird biosamples into the US and let’s see what happens THEN.

Didn’t it bother you that the complicated graph of the life-cycle showing three branches with a total of 11 distinct stages was supported by a grand total of 6 photographs (two of which are the same original red cell stage)? If you were writing a ground-breaking paper on the first known alien life-form, don’t you think you’d have been a little more careful reporting your data? Wasn’t it odd that the cells in all the cycles have exactly the same spherical shape, differing usually only in size and whether they encapsulate smaller cells or not? These seem suspiciously like lipid bilayer vesicles whose shape and size depend merely on the rate at which they were depressurized and cooled. The smaller cells would scatter light more efficiently, and combined with their greater numbers would appear to have a higher turbidity. Instead of being evidence of growth, though, all it represents is the reprocessing of a certain area of lipid membrane from a few large spheres into more smaller spheres. This is only a guess, though, as Dr. Louis did a thoroughly inadequate of disclosing his methods and results.

I’ll let y’all know if I hear back from him….

If they are merely lipid vesicles, why would he state that they could be “grown from the traces left in the culture bottle?” Lipid vesicles would not increase in mass and number, would they?

Where in his papers did he mention measuring the cell mass? Nowhere. The only evidence of growth provided is cell number and turbidity. Reprocessing of a constant amount of lipid into smaller vesicles would increase the ‘cell’ count while not constituting growth. The turbidity depends not only on the cell density but on their size. And the traces left in the bottle would have been lipid. It would be the one of the few things left after all the volatiles boiled or evaporated away.

July windfrom this excellent link. There’s more of a seasonal effect than implied in my original post.

-barakn

(my sciscoop password is randomly-generated and impossible to remember, I ’spose there’s a way to change it)

Yup. It’s all described here.

I found Dr. Louis’ articles on line and asked him if he has measured the relative abundance of the isotopes of the red rain. He said he did not have access to those facilities to but would really like to do those tests.
My university actually has a mass spectrometry facility that I can use and so I offered recently to do the tests for him. Briefly for those unfamilar with the significance of the technique, with this test I can determine the exact composition of my sample, as well as the ratio of various isotopes of common elements. The interesting thing about these ratios is that barring certain noted exceptions (nuclear reactions, respiration for carbon 14 tests, etc…), they are largly constant for all terrestial matter. Thus this is a good test to determine not only the composition, but also whether it is terrestial.
I’ll keep you guys updated if I hear anything.

~Kevin

I happened to see this report on the red (and other) coloured rainfall over Kerala only recently. As the first person to go to the site and collect samples, I have some information that has apparently not been posted here. A complete report on our studies is available as a pdf file that can be mailed to anyone who is interested. I am just clarifying some points here.

I was the first scientist to be informed of the phenomenon and had the privilege of collecting a reasonably good quantity of rainwater. As the news flashed in the media the next day, reports started coming in from a number of places in the state, and some of them had other colours like blue and yellow. We were not able to cope with the number of reports and could collect samples only from a few places. I give below details about the phenomenon at the first place (Changanasserry) from where I got the report.

(1) The rain was visibly red and very deep in colour. Water collected in vessels kept outside was brick red to brown. This was seen around 8 am. A number of people reported hearing an extremely loud thunder early in the morning, around 5:15 am, and a few people also reported seeing something like a lightning. This was an isolated event and was not repeated. We talked to a large number of people and determined that people in an elongated region of about one and a half to two kilometer length lying roughly in the east-west direction had heard the sound with almost similar intensity right overhead. People living in areas adjacent to it could identify that the sound came from one side. We concluded that this could not have been a lightning stroke, but could have been only a meteor that came close to the ground. Our immediate conclusion was, therefore, that the colour was due to meteor dust. Eventually, we found that it contained some elliptical shaped organism and gave the sample to microbiologists. They cultured the sample in different media and came to the conclusion that it consisted of spores from a lichn-forming algae of the family Trentepohlia.

(2) Barakn’s observation that the winds would have carried the particles very far is true. But it has to be noted that the meteor (we are certain that there was one) came from the west at a low angle and could have started disintegrating much before it reached over land in Kerala. If the meteor (if at all it had been the cause) had deposited dust in the lower stratosphere and the upper troposphere, winds would have initially carried it to the west and then, at lower heights, brought it back to the east and over Kerala. This can be confirmed by taking a look at the wind pattern over the region at different altitudes.

(3) Barakn’s observation that it could have been only dust from Africa or the Arabian Peninsula cannot be true because we have observed and isolated large quantities of the red coloured spores from the rain water.

(4) Barakn says that Godfrey Louis should go back to studying crystals. Perhaps. But I am yet to see any biologist taking any serious interest in this phenomenon. I am sorry to say that even the microbiologist who conducted the study based on our sample did not find the time to look more seriously into the matter. Our estimate was that, in the least, one thousand kilograms of spores had fallen in that region. This is a very conservative estimate, after making allowances for a number of possible and improbable errors, because we just could into believe the figures we initially arrived at. We still are unable to say how so much spores, if indeed that is what they really were, went into the sky one fine morning. Many such unanswered questions are mentioned in our report. May be Godfrey’s conclusions are incorrect. But he has succeeded in drawing attention to a strange phenomenon that is yet to be explained.

It is a tragedy that scientists from a premier institute in India should make such announcements without even taking a look at one sample of coloured rain water. If they had taken the pains to put one drop of the coloured rain water under a microscope and take a peek through the lens, they would not have made such statements.

vsasi

I just saw your reply. I would love to have a copy of the pdf report emailed to me.

send to keeb333 AT gmail DOT com. T

Thanks

I’m very very late in finding this thread…b ut I just heard about this wholet hing yesterday and it’s the coolest most interesting thing I’ve ever ever heard in my life… this colored rain stuff. I’d like to learn as much about it as I can. Could I have a copy of the file?

cameo AT groundcontrol.us

Thanks soooo much!!