Morningstar displays his dismal misunderstanding of microbiology

        Internet woo radio, it seems, is falling over itself in its eagerness to give a platform to Robert Morningstar and his erroneous ideas. Today it was the turn of The Higherside Chats to offer us all an hour of our lives that we can never get back.

        AM* happened to touch on two topics that I know a lot about, and in both cases showed such a calamitous misunderstanding that it almost literally took my breath away. Here's the first, in his exact words:

18:39 "About three years ago, a few NASA scientists came out and said that they had found a special form of life in Mono Lake, California, which was based on arsenic. It was a cell, or a culture, that reproduced itself and its metabolism and its life cycle was based not on carbon but on arsenic of all things ... And the premise of this revelation was --- her name was Dr. Wolf, and she had a hyphenated name, but I only remember Dr Wolf, or Wolfson. But she said a very interesting thing. She said the important thing about their finding was that the search for life as we have conducted it for the last 40 years -- life on Mars, life on the Moon, life anywhere -- has been conducted through too narrow a window. We've been looking only for carbon-based life. And this showed that there is another form of life that was based on arsenic. And then she made the most amazing statement. She said "Now this life-form cannot thrive on Earth because the temperature is too hot. It needs all of its energy just to maintain its steady state, so it cannot expand, propagate, reproduce, it just has to keep accumulating the arsenic to maintain its steady-state existence. However, on another planet where the temperature was much colder than Earth...." and she then said "perhaps on some place like Saturn's moon Titan, where the temperature is 167 below zero it might be possible for such an organism to thrive and propagate." That was [an] Earth-shattering statement. And really the important thing was pointing out that perhaps the paradigm was wrong -- that our assumption that all life, any life, must be based on carbon is a fallacy, it's an erroneous assumption. So they called for reviewing all the previous work that we've done, and to start expanding, opening the window a little wider, in order to see whether or not we missed something."

        Well, of course he's here  referring to the fetching Dr Felisa Wolfe-Simon, known as "Iron Lisa," and the extremophile bacterium she called GFAJ-1. The only things Morningstar got roughly right were "about three years ago" (actually December 2010) and "Mono Lake." The rest of it is absolute balderdash -- he managed to get the story even more wrong than Richard Hoagland did when he reported it at the time.

        Iron Lisa never made the claim that GFAJ-1 was not carbon-based. The organism is carbon-based without any question at all. The claimed arsenic substitution was for phosphorous, not carbon. Duhhhhh.... She never even claimed that arsenic was incorporated into the nucleotide bases which are the four letters of the genetic code^{note 1} (that's the part Hoagland got wrong.) All she said was that, in the low-phosphorous, high-arsenic environment of Mono Lake, this organism has found a way of substituting arsenic for some of the phosphorous in its DNA structural backbone.

        I saw the whole of the press conference on 2nd December 2010, and followed the story carefully. To my knowledge Wolfe-Simon never said that GFAJ-1 was more suited to Titan than Earth, or that it could not thrive in Mono Lake. As most readers of this blog already know, her findings were later discredited by Rosie Redfield and Alex Bradley. "GFAJ" turned out to mean "Get Felisa A Job." The story is quite well told in wikipedia.

        Moving right along, here's AM* again, on a subject I really know a lot about.

21:10 "Dr Levin^{note 2}, who is in charge of the Mars Viking Life research project, and they think they found life, back in 1976 when Viking landed. They did an experiment, and the experiment was to scoop up some dirt and to drop in some nutrients that had a little bit of radioactivity in. And the premise was that if there were any microbial activity in the soil that it would eat the nutrient and exude gases that could be picked up because they were radioactive. Indeed they did. And an announcement was made that there was life on Mars. Then NASA quashed that finding and said that the experiment was wrong, and that they did another experiment that proved it was wrong. Well, the experiment that they did was a different experiment, and it was intentionally conducted to kill any life that was in the soil. I was watching Dr Levin on a show on the Science Channel --it was called "NASA's Secret UFO Files" And he said that what they had done was they had taken soil and cooked it. And then tested that soil for life. And he said "How can you find any life in soil that has been heated in such a way that it would kill any microbial life?" "

        I wrote that I really know about this subject. Yes, indeed -- I was personally right there at JPL as all this was unfolding, making a TV documentary about the very subject of extraterrestrial life for the BBC. So to say I was interested would be an understatement.

        First of all, Gil Levín was not  "in charge of the Mars Viking Life research project." Harold "Chuck" Klein held that position, and Gerry Soffen was overall head of Viking Science. Dr Levín was one of three PIs whose life-detection experiments were carried on each of the two Viking landers.

        Morningstar's description of the Labeled Release experiment is correct, and it's also correct that its results were arguably positive for life. However, his description of the other experiment is woefully, hopelessly, wrong. He must be referring to the Pyrolytic Release experiment -- which, by the way, was not "a NASA experiment" any more than Levín's was. Norman Horowitz of CalTech was the PI.

        Horowitz's strategy was to test for carbon fixation by micro-organisms. He fed the soil water in the presence of radio-labeled carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. After several days, he tested to see if any labeled carbon had been "ingested". The way of doing this was to heat the soil to 650°C and see if any labeled carbon was given off. To say that the experiment "killed microbial life" is thoroughly misleading. The answer to the question "How can you find any life in soil that has been heated in such a way?" is "Very easily. It was done over and over again in trials with all kinds of microbial life before Viking ever flew."

        I blogged about this as long ago as April 2008. Read it again if you want to know why Gil Levín's experiment was not considered definitive in the end.

Now for the good news...
        At the very beginning of his Higherside Chat, Morningstar allowed that he was fallible. That he might make mistakes. He correctly said that being wrong isn't a crime, and that he "welcomed corrections."

Consider yourself corrected, Robert.

=========================
1] There is no phosphorous in adenine, thymine, cytosine or guanine.
2] Small point -- Morningstar mispronounces Dr Levín's name. The accent is on the second syllable. But you have to be a real space buff to know that, not a dilettante like AM*.

Review of 'Ancient Aliens on the Red Planet'

        At 09:20 in the commercial-free version of this latest History Channel travesty (S6E16), we see a region of Mars clearly labeled CYDONIA, and to make things perfectly clear, a flashing target over the spot. The narration is:

"The Cydonia region of Mars. July 20th, 1976. (CUT to animation of spacecraft approaching) An alien spacecraft, sent from Earth, touches down on the Red Planet. After a ten-month journey, Viking 1 has reached its destination." (CUT to historical footage at JPL, Gentry Lee and Gerry Soffen celebrating the success of Viking 1)

        I blinked, and re-ran the sequence to be quite sure. Then my face hit the desk (OK, metaphorically.) OMG, THEY THINK VIKING 1 LANDED AT CYDONIA!!!

source: Google Mars

FACT: Cydonia is at 40.74N, 9.46W. Viking 1 landed at Chryse Planitia, 22.46N, 47.96W.

        This appalling error takes Ancient Aliens to new depths of ignorance and mendacity. Jason Colavito has also reviewed the episode on his blog, and he makes a far better job of reviewing the monstrous errors in history and mythology than I possibly could, so please read it.

        In the Twitterscape, Mike Bara complained for the second time in a week that he'd been deprived of due credit:

        That may be how he remembers it now, but if you read Mike Bara's own account of the Enterprise Mission analysis of the Pathfinder images, written at the time, it's pretty plain that it was Guiseppe Pezzella who first pointed out the so-called sphinx.

        Bara's first complaint was over Richard Hoover being invited to the Open Minds International UFO Congress to talk about the controversial discovery of microbiology in a Martian meteorite -- work that Bara claims was his. Does Mike have an electron microscope in his kitchen, I wonder? He sniped at Maureen Elsberry, the congress organiser, and I loved Maureen's reply. "Mike, get over yourself."

        It's certainly true that a casual viewer would have got the idea that John Brandenburg came up with the "sphinx on Mars" fairy story. An elaborate sequence with Giorgio Tsoukalos and some models floated the preposterous idea that the "Twin Peaks" visible from the Mars Pathfinder landing site are a close analogy of the pyramids of Giza. The fact is that the Twin Peaks are nothing like pyramids and the mound Hoagland & Bara (and Brandenburg) have called the sphinx is not like a sphinx at all. And it faces North, not due East as Bara wrote in his nasty book.^{note 1} Here are high-res stereo pairs of Twin Peaks, the "sphinx," and other dark blocky outcrops showing that there's nothing special about the sphinxy rock.

photo credit: History Channel

        Predictably enough, Bara trotted out further fairy stories including several that this blog has discredited in fairly recent memory. The Viking Labeled Release experiment (and it was nice to see Dr. Gil Levín tell the story himself here), and the canard that Gerry Soffen lied about the second image of the so-called Face at Owen Mesa (see also this post.)

        Richard Hoagland, inventor of the Face at Cydonia (and much other balderdash besides) was conspicuous by his absence. Mike Bara said -- again, in Twitterstan -- that he'd  turned down the offer to appear on this show. I bet what really happened was that he said he'd love to be on the show but he'd want to  be credited as co-producer and he'd want first-class travel for him and his companion. His arrogance is such that he even talks himself out of opportunities to put his ego (and his disregard for truth) on parade.

=================================

[1] Brandenburg speculated that, even if the Twin Peaks don't look like pyramids now, maybe they did when they were built, and millions of years of erosion has reduced them to the pitiful state we see now. The same thing has been claimed for the 'Face', too, and it's what is known in logic as argumentum ad excremetum torii. It's basically taking a desperate hope, unsupported by anything, and dressing it up to look like evidence. He also trotted out his theory about Xenon 129/132 ratios, "proving" that there was a nuclear war on Mars once. Stuart Robbins disposed of that one a year ago.

Viking biology (repeat from 2008)

        Mike Bara garbage-tweets this week about Viking biology. He was responding to this from Maureen Elsberry:

Retired #NASA Astrobiologist Will Present Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life at #UFO Conference

 Mike posted:

Already found on Mars in 1976. Dr. Gil Levin.

        As far back as April 2008 this blog set the record straight on Gil Levín and the meaning of his biology experiment. I'm repeating it below, with a few now-dead links removed.

{{cue the harp arpeggios}}

        Hoagland & Bara appear to be confused about Viking biology. For those interested, here is a digest of the actual facts:

        Both the Viking spacecraft landers had identical biology experiments. Each spacecraft carried three separate experiments designed to test for biology in Martian topsoil. The experiments were developed independently by three different Principal Investigators (PIs). The experiments were:

Gas Exchange (GEX) PI Vance Oyama, NASA Ames
Labeled Release (LR) PI Gilbert Levín, Biospherics, Inc.
Pyrolytic Release (PR) PI Norman Horowitz, CalTech

        In addition, a Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (PI Klaus Biemann, MIT) supported the main biology package by testing for organic molecules.

Results: At both landing sites the results were essentially identical. GEX and PR were unequivocally negative. LR initially showed strongly positive results, with the control (a sterilized sample) showing negative as expected. Subsequent nutrient injections, however, showed no response. The GCMS detected no organic molecules.

Interpretation: Responsibility for interpreting this enigma fell on the Head of Viking Biology, Harold Klein, with support from Viking Chief Scientist Gerry Soffen. Both were NASA employees. Their call was thumbs down for Martian biology. From a scientific point of view, looking at the overall picture, an absolutely correct call -- but the LR results begged for an explanation. The hypothesis that was developed involved a chemical, not biological, reaction involving superoxides in the soil.

        Dr Levín has been protesting this interpretation for more than 40 years. His main point is that the LR experiment detected life as pre-defined by agreed criteria during mission design. He has developed quite persuasive explanations for why the two other experiments and the GCMS gave negative results.

        Hoagland & Bara seem aware that this is a controversy but they get it wrong. They maintain that there was a deliberate campaign within NASA to conceal Levín's data. That allegation is categorically untrue. Consider these points:

* The enigmatic results were extensively discussed with the media at the time by Klein and Soffen. 
* No attempt whatsoever has ever been made to suppress publication by Dr Levín of his own interpretation. Mike Bara himself posted on the darkmission blog links to six of Levín's publications on the question.
* The complete LR data set, including the PI's notebook, is available to anyone on a NASA-sponsored web site.

        Other comments by Hoagland & Bara suggest that they also think the consensus view is wrong — in other words, that they think Levín's experiment alone proves the existence of life on Mars. It's a contentious and highly technical issue, and considering that neither of them has any training in biology whatsoever, their views will certainly be ignored by anybody who matters.

Open letter to Adrienne Loska

Dear Adrienne,
Happy New Year.

As your client Mike Bara moves into the intensive writing phase of his book Ancient Aliens on Mars, you might usefully advise him as follows:

 ================================================

* The so-called Face on Mars is not a mile-wide sculpture. We know that because the HiRISE telescope on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has shown the feature at sufficiently high resolution (< 1m/px) that the facial features previously claimed on the basis of poorer images can be seen to be imaginary. Enough people know this that, if you write that it's the deliberate work of a Martian civilization, you will once more be a laughing stock.

* Planet Earth does an orbit of the Sun in 365 days. Mars does its orbit in 687 days. It follows inevitably that there is a very great difference between the closest and farthest approaches of the two planets. The very slight eccentricity of the orbit of Mars makes an almost negligible contribution to that difference. If you write, as you did in November 2010, "If both orbits were circular, ... [t]hey would maintain basically the same distance relative to each other" you will again become a laughing stock.

* Please do not repeat your opinion that Gerry Soffen lied about the second Viking image of the so-called Face. The reason is that your opinion is incorrect. Here's why.

* You probably ought not to repeat the pseudo-fact that Olympus Mons is at 19.5° latitude. The reason is  that it is not. It's at 18.65°N.

* Please be particularly circumspect when writing anything about gravitation. In writing on this topic in the past, you've made so many disastrous errors that I seriously worry whether you have any understanding of it at all. My neighbor has a 12-year-old daughter who's really keen on physics -- if you like I can pass any of your copy by her for checking.

* Good luck. Remember, fact-checking is so, so easy in this age of google and wikipedia. I fully realize that Adventures Unlimited Press doesn't give a rat's ass about facts, but when your text includes horrible errors I, your faithful manager, look bad too. People think I can't control you.

 ================================================

Regards,
expat

Did Gerry Soffen lie about the second orbit?

        Both Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara, those two untrained and unqualified pontificators on all things extraterrestrial (and in some cases terrestrial, too) have said more than once that Gerry Soffen, Chief Scientist of the highly successful Viking program of 1976, lied about the "Face on Mars" image captured on 25th July 1976 and first noticed by Tobias Owen.

photo credit: NASA

        Here's their story. Gerry showed the "Face" image -- Frame 35A72 -- to the press in the Von Karman auditorium, chuckled, and added "On the next orbit, it all went away. The feature looked quite different." This was when he called the mesa the oft-quoted "trick of light and shadow." Hoagland & Bara have said more than once that Gerry must have been lying, because by the time the Viking 1 orbiter came over that latitude again, Cydonia would have moved "hundreds of miles" due to the natural rotation of the planet. The orbiter was in a more or less polar orbit.

        They're thinking of a typical Earth-satellite situation, where the so-called "walk rate" is typically about 22.5° of longitude. The period of a low reconnaissance-type orbit is ~90 min, and (360° x 1.5)/24 = 22.5. However, the situation at Mars in 1976 was very, very different. The Martian day is 24.622 hours -- very similar to that of Earth. However, the Viking orbiter's orbit was much higher -- 1513 x 33,000 km, and its period was, guess what? 24.66 hours¹. Almost the same as the rotation rate of the planet it was spinning around. Now the calculation is (360° x 24.66)/24.622. = 360.55°. In other words, the walk on Viking 1 was only 0.55°. That works out to only 25.3 km on the ground, at the sub-satellite point. The orbital camera could surely have re-photographed "Owen Mesa" with relative ease.

Gerry Soffen. Not a liar.

image credit: NASA

        I thought of this again today, listening to Mike Bara parading his ignorance around Internet radio once again, as he plugged his error-filled book on Paracast. He was complaining about the tyranny of what he called 'Googlepedia' -- the google-wikipedia axis that is, according to him, totally dominated by 'NASA Brownshirts' in matters of space technology. As an example he stated that he had more than once added a note about Gerry Soffen's lie to the Face on Mars wikipedia article, only to have his edit wiped out immediately by "NASA."

        One of the fine features of the wiki is the ability to reconstruct the entire edit history of any article, and indeed there's evidence of an attempt to insert such material at least once. At 03:57 on 27th July this year, somebody with IP address 213.152.225.82 inserted this text:

"He also added that a second image, taken hours later, shows no sign of the Face at all - to support his claim of the "light and shadow trickery". It was a lie as the mentioned "second image" taken "hours later" never existed - the orbiter was imaging completely different part of the planet at that point."

        The edit was reverted at 07:48 by an editor called Dougweller, with the comment "find a reliable source first." Here's Dougweller's personal page -- I see no indication whatsoever that he has any connection with NASA. Here's a list of his edits -- he seems to be interested in the Queen of Sheba, and Edinburgh Academy.

        I do a little wiki-editing myself, and I've been known to gnash my teeth somewhat about "citation nazis." The geek-comic xkcd had fun with them, too, a while back.

image credit: xkcd

        But really, it isn't that arduous. The point is that anything that would be likely to be challenged by other editors must be accompanied by a citation from a reliable source.

        Mike Bara isn't a reliable source. And now for the really bad news -- he revealed on Paracast that he has a contract for his next book, Ancient Aliens on Mars. Oh no, here we go again........

==========================
[1] Viking 1 Orbiter Mission Profile