Possible alien life found

[Razmos]

A team of British scientists is convinced it has found proof of alien life, after it harvested strange particles from the edge of space.

The scientists sent a balloon 27km into the stratosphere, which came back carrying small biological organisms which they believe can only have originated from space.

Article

Well that's exciting. kinda.

[KhainiWest]

That's awesome

[Malthe]

I'll wait for actual confirmation before i get excited.
While it'd be cool for alien life to be confirmed it just seems far too uncertain for now.

[JoeTang]

How to sensationalist media.

[Niernen]

Well, i hope they sterilized their hands.

[Lozmaster]

This is what a Space balloon looks like anyway.

If anyone wants to read the published results, it's freely viewable online.
http://journalofcosmology.com/JOC22/Polonnaruwa11R.pdf

And Holy hell, the JoC website looks like it was built by someone with a GCSE in ICT at best.

edit: Wow, holy pomegranate is this a poorly written paper.

[SunYanZi]

Wow. This is pretty exciting! :D

[ExtremeMonotreme]

Needs more cowbell evidence.

[DavyJonesx]

At first I thought that was an image of some notebook paper...

[HumpMyHeal]

This seems a little silly. Such a simple way of getting specimens from space makes it seem fishy that it took over 50 years after space exploration began to finally find that the small organisms came in from space.

Also, microscopic organisms live very high up in our atmosphere (but it still within the boundaries of earth).

[Jazeon]

"Some of the samples were captured covered with cosmic dust, adding further credence to the idea that they have originated from space."

"The particles are very clean," added Prof Wainwright. "They don't have any dust attached to them, which again suggests they're not coming to earth. Similarly, cosmic dust isn't stuck to them, so we think they came from an aquatic environment, and the most obvious aquatic environment in space is a comet."

huh?

[ShadeCaro]

This seems pretty weird. Perhaps it's just something from space because we have had space exploration for years and not a single thing.

Still exciting though.

[Darkstars]

Microorganisms in the stratosphere is nothing new or exciting. This paper details novel species found at up to 41km in altitude.
http://ijs.sgmjournals.org/content/59/12/2977.long

http://journalofcosmology.com/JOC22/...TION_final.pdf
The research methods used in this is pretty substandard actually. It's not a surprise they had to publish in a less than well known journal. Their method of sterilization was terrible. Air-blasting and swabbing with alcohol is a not even close to what a study like this needs for sterility. I'm surprised they didn't autoclave it. The other paper even UV sterilized their collection tubes and tested two of them for contamination. Their statement of "because of the very low temperatures and high exposure to UV radiation, such biological entities would not be alive in the stratosphere" is completely incorrect. Their citations are mostly papers published by the same freaking author. This paper is a mess of leaps of faith and inconclusive evidence. They didn't even do any real analysis, they just looked at it under a microscope and said "yep that looks like life". Nothing to see here folks, it's not even peer reviewed.

[Lozmaster]

Yeah, at this point, it's pretty clear that this paper is a load of bull shi't and that no-one should be taking it seriously.