[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Gil Levin has a new document on the Spherix website: Modern myths of Mars (1.3 Mb PDF).

[edstrick]

The Phoenix lander is going to have a quite sophisticated wet-analysis instrument for characterizing soil and icy-soil samples. It will go a long way toward providing meaningful information on the soil-moisture and soil-nutrient-solution interactions observed with Viking's biology experiments.

I've personally had a couple run-ins with Gil Levin as a grad student, and he's an expert evidence cherry-picker and insinuated-inference-maker. I have not exhaustively investigated the soil analysis results and modeling work to understand his viewpoints and how it clashes with other team and research group viewpoints, but I take his opinions with a bagfull of side-walk-ice-melting salt, rather than a grain of salt. One thing I don't recall him ever DIRECTLY, head-on addressing is the total lack of evidence of GROWTH in his instruments results, rather than a heat-sterilizable one-shot chemical reaction.