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CELLS from India’s red rain of 2001 multiply under extreme heat – and they don’t contain DNA.
Red rain in India occurred in July 2001, what tainted the rain has become a point of great scientific interest.
Many theories were put forward at the time… but in the final analysis more questions than answers resulted. After extensive study these are the surprising findings of the research.
The rain turned red in India. And not just red – The Hindu claimed witness reports of yellow, green and black rain in the months that followed. The first theories to eemrge was 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.
Today, after a further four years of studying the cells, joined by a leading panspermia theorist from the UK, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Professor Lewis has published claims that they are unlike anything found on Earth.
He says the cells – inert at room temperature – begin to reproduce at 121C.
Within two hours of being exposed to the heat, “daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the number of cells in the samples increases with length of exposure”, they say in the new report.
Although not well supported by science in general, some scientists have put forward the theory that life as we don’t know it may have arrived from deep outer space having survived a ride on or in arriving space dust or other incoming materials. This concept is known as “panspermia” whereby alien microscopic lifeforms arrive on earth and commence life in a fashion alien to our knowledge of such things.
The debate began 15 years ago when several scientists backed claims there was evidence of life in a Martian meteorite found in the Allan Hills in Antarctica. It’s been proven that life can survive in space, just as it’s been proven that the interior of the Mars meteorite never rose above 50C during its journey to Earth.
While the panspermia angle is already being rejected by the scientific community at large, there’s plenty of interest in the final finding of Prof Louis’s team – the cells contain no DNA.
“As a biologist, let me assure you that a cell-sized and shaped organism that reproduces, lives off LB and doesn’t appear to have any nucleic acid template (DNA or RNA) is a revolutionary discovery in and of itself,” one commentor wrote at Technology Review.
The only lifeforms that occur or Earth without DNA, according to another commentor, are proteins known as “prions”, best known on Earth as the cause of Mad Cow Disease.
The team’s findings are yet to be verified.
Read the original story at Beyond Prophecy