Worms from outer Space!

Two conflicting stories for this afternoons post, but both about the same thing. Fossils in meteorites. Many of you will know the theory proposed that all life originated elsewhere in the universe and was carried to this planet via "space rocks" or meteorites. Now NASA scientist Dr Richard Hoover claims to have found life in a meteorite he has been studying. Many of his peers have laughed at his claims, but some including Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe who is director of astrobiology at Cardiff university has stated that Dr Hoover has proven without a doubt that "we are all aliens". The story is reported in both the Sun Tabloid (not very reputable I know, but I linked from the Palaeontological Association website and I trust their information 100%) and on Christian Science Monitor (CMS), and online web-based newspaper. Although Dr Hoover is an astrobiologist working for NASA, NASA have declined to comment on any of Dr Hoovers claims, a point that the CMS picks up on. The article in the Sun is short, only a couple of hundred words stating the basic facts, where the research has been published and a few quotes, the CMS however have gone to town with perhaps 1000 words on the article. Although they are trying to put across a non-biased opinion, it is obvious from the writing style that the CMS thinks that alien fossils are a load of rubbish, and this is made clear in the several paragraphs they devote to calling the journal that the research is published in "rubbish" and including several quotes from those that strongly disagree with Dr Hoovers research, but no quotes from those that agree with it. The CMS does however do one thing, they link directly to the original research article (which is available free online, so read it please and comment under here with what you think ).

These articles lead me to doing a quick search on, what else, google. I know that this type of research is at the forefront of biology, geobiology, and planetary science, so how accessible is it to the general public how are curious, or scared (because let's face it, several people are going to be imagining a war of the worlds type situation)?

So "origins of life in space" was my search terms, and it yielded 5.5 million results. Not an impressive number when you think that the "pop sensation" Justin Bieber has over 202 million hits. So the first few results don't include wikipedia (which is a fantastic thing, sometimes) but a number of confusing articles debating the subject and talking about glycerins and elements (and even I had to "wiki" a lot of the terms). This is not good! We want to make important discoveries such as this available to Joe Bloggs. Maybe we need a Joe Bloggs google? A search engine that only brings up hits that the common person will understand? I mean we have google scholar for the academics, why not google bloggs for the education of the public? Maybe I'll contact Google and see what we can do :p

GF