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Purveyor, Fine Asian Porn
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posts: 38,323
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Originally Posted by dyna mo
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Joseph's Ph.d is NOT in Astrobiology, or anything connected to what he is suing about... 
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Dr. Joseph obtained his Ph.D. from the Chicago Medical School and completed his training at Yale University Medical School (in the department of Neurology and Neuropsychology)
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Ah yes, Rhawn Joseph, the publisher of the Journal of Cosmology:
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I've mentioned Cosmology before ? it isn't a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth.
It doesn't exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint.
For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: "Northern California"), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific "publications" on this web site.
It is not an auspicious beginning. Finding credible evidence of extraterrestrial microbes is the kind of thing you'd expect to see published in Science or Nature, but the fact that it found a home on a fringe website that pretends to be a legitimate science journal ought to set off alarms right there.
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Remember when, as scientists, we?re told to check our sources? Well, this is the reason. Right off the bat, context clues should have given this away as too good to be true.
First and foremost, the news was broken by Fox News. Fox News is a lot of things, but a scientific publication it isn?t.
Skeptical clue #1. Next, note that this paradigm-shifting paper was published in something called the Journal of Cosmology, and not Nature or Science.
Third, a brief search for information about the Journal of Cosmology reveals that it?s web-only, of poor quality, and seems to be published for the benefit of one crank, Rhawn Joseph. I mean, the headline of the article itself links to a $94 book by the author - come on!
Furthermore, the quality of the article itself is exceptionally low. In the media articles, an intelligent-sounding woman with nice credentials gave some reassuring quotes about the peer-review process, but apparently no one decided to fact check her.
Interspersed with low-quality and inconsistent electron micrographs of bacteria are also images of mammoth hair and mummy skin. Here is Myer?s take:
The extraterrestrial ?bacteria? photos are a pain to browse through, as well, because they are published at a range of different magnifications, and even when they are directly comparing an SEM of one to an SEM of a real bacterium, they can?t be bothered to put them at the same scale.
Peering at them and mentally tweaking the size, though, one surprising result is that all of their boojums are relatively huge ? these would be big critters, more similar in size to eukaryotic cells than E. coli. And all of them preserved so well, not crushed into a smear of carbon, not ruptured and evaporated away, all just sitting there, posing, like a few billion years in a vacuum was a day in the park. Who knew that milling about in a comet for the lifetime of a solar system was such a great preservative?
Basically, the data is complete rubbish. Nothing about this whole spectacle should lend it any credibility.
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