New answers tagged biology
19
Any strong claims made by news outlets are journalistic rather than scientific.
The linked article is pretty cautious, and reflects the researchers' position rather well. Other stories have gone a little further: Sky News, for example Signs of alien life detected on Venus --
Microbes unlike any life on Earth could be thriving high in the clouds of Venus, ...
124
TL;DR
The detection of phosphine is not conclusive evidence of life on Venus; it simply indicates that there are unknown chemical pathways on the planet that are producing it. While these may be biological in nature, they also may not be. Therefore, the discovery might be evidence of life on Venus.
What the article claims
I should start by noting that the ...
14
In a sciencemag.org article, which was apparently about this study, they state that:
In the process of destroying free radicals, vitamin C turns into what's called a vitamin C radical. If certain metal ions are nearby, vitamin C radical can turn compounds called lipid hydroperoxides into genotoxins, which switch bases around in DNA, disrupting its delicate ...
5
I have managed to gain access to the full text of the referenced article. I can't pretend to understand it fully (not being a biochemist), but the authors do not state whether the vitamin C they used in their experiments was synthetic or a plant extract, and none of the results in the paper feature a comparison of different types of vitamin C.
Therefore I ...
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