For the most part, Joseph and his co-authors use images obtained by NASA rovers and draw red lines and arrows to point out features they believe correspond to fungal growth. The new paper, dubbed "Fungi on Mars? Evidence of Growth and Behavior From Sequential Images" and available on ResearchGate, rehashes some of the old arguments for life on Mars, using inaccurate methodology to draw its conclusions. It has been accused of being a predatory publisher, charging scientists fees to be published in its journals without checking the quality of the submitted papers. +39 more See all photos Day of the trufflesĪdvances in Microbiology is a relatively obscure journal published by Scientific Research Publishing, which is headquartered in China and has previously been caught out for republishing scientific articles, according to Nature. Last June, I published a piece on Joseph and these claims, which eventually led to the journal retracting Joseph's article, stating "the article proffers insufficient critical assessment of the material presented and literature cited, and fails to provide a solid underpinning for the speculative statements made in the article which, in their view, invalidates the conclusions drawn."īut on Wednesday, Joseph's claims made it into another journal, known as Advances in Microbiology. In November of that year, Joseph got a piece through peer review and into the journal Astrophysics & Space Science. Until 2019, when Joseph's claims really hit the big leagues. His assertions sometimes make it to the big leagues and spill over into the press but, for the most part, they haven't landed in legitimate scientific journals or been scrutinized by other experts in space science. Joseph has, for over a decade, published claims about life on other planets on his website and in pseudo-scientific journals he oversees. So let's pull back the curtain and explain what is really going on (again!) The 'Space Tiger King'Īt the center, or sometimes just off to the side, of these outlandish claims is a man named Rhawn Gabriel Joseph.Īccording to his webpage " ," Joseph is a lapsed neuroscientist who made major contributions to the field of neuroplasticity in the 1970s. Part of me wants to let it slide because in some cases any publicity really is good publicity, but this is bad science and some websites have erroneously headlined articles with "Scientists Found Evidence of Fungus Growing on Mars" when that is simply not the case. The headlines certainly are interesting: Imagine if we found fungi on Mars or Venus! It would literally rewrite our ideas about life in the cosmos - but the articles rarely interrogate the scientific evidence for the wild claims. The "mushrooms on Mars and fungi on Venus" theory is a worn-out, debunked idea that appears like clockwork, about once a year. The first thought: Ah shit, here we go again. According to websites like the Daily Mail, scientists were making a pretty wild claim: Fungi were alive and well on the red planet. But on Wednesday, Mars appeared in the news for all the wrong reasons. NASA's Perseverance rover is up there searching for life, and the agency's Ingenuity Mars helicopter is pulling off daring aerial feats.
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