{"id":122356,"date":"2021-05-07T18:23:13","date_gmt":"2021-05-08T01:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/nope-we-havent-just-found-evidence-for-mushrooms-growing-on-mars"},"modified":"2021-05-07T18:23:13","modified_gmt":"2021-05-08T01:23:13","slug":"nope-we-havent-just-found-evidence-for-mushrooms-growing-on-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/nope-we-havent-just-found-evidence-for-mushrooms-growing-on-mars","title":{"rendered":"Nope, We Haven\u2019t Just Found Evidence For Mushrooms Growing on Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Maybe not lol.<\/p>\n

\n

If we ever found life on another planet<\/a> it would probably be the biggest news of the millennium, and you\u2019d expect the evidence to be published in a highly prestigious journal like Nature or Science. So, when a study claiming that mushrooms are growing on Mars appears in an obscure and largely discredited publication, you have to be more than a little skeptical<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, a preprint of a new study<\/a> appeared online, bearing the eyebrow-raising title Fungi on Mars? Evidence of Growth and Behavior From Sequential Images<\/em>. Unfortunately, the paper is due for publication in the journal Advances in Microbiology<\/a>, which is part of the Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) portfolio. Given that SCIRP has a history of plagiarizing articles from other journals<\/a>, it\u2019s pretty difficult to take any of its content seriously.<\/p>\n

The study itself comprises an analysis of images taken by NASA\u2019s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, which have been carrying out observations on the Red Planet<\/a>, in addition to photographs taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Using red circles and arrows to highlight certain features, the study authors point out a series of structures that look a lot like rocks but also maybe a tiny bit like puffball mushrooms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe not lol. If we ever found life on another planet it would probably be the biggest news of the millennium, and you\u2019d expect the evidence to be published in a highly prestigious journal like Nature or Science. So, when a study claiming that mushrooms are growing on Mars appears in an obscure and largely [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}