Its life Tym, but not as we know it.

Source

I've been interested in the claim by Dr. Richard Hoover, as astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight centre, that he’s found alien life.

As this Gizmodo article notes: "Hoover is being incredibly open about his paper. As stated above, peer scrutiny has already begun, to the tune of 100 experts who have started dissecting his work in advance of its official publication. "

However, after a bit of hunting, I came across this article which led me to this wonderful blog entry by one of my former (and all time greatest) lecturers at UBC, Rosie Redfield.

Rosie, whose judgment I know to be both fair and incisive, concluded:

The Ivuna meteorite sample showed a couple of micron-scale squiggles, one of which contained about 2.5-fold more carbon than the background. One of the five Orguil samples had at least one patch of clustered fibers; these contained more sulfur and magnesium than the background, and less silicon. As evidence for life this is pathetic, no better than that presented by McKay's group for the ALH84001 Martian meteorite in 1996.

She continued on to note that the Journal and the Editor aren't very impressive either:

The journal proudly announces that it is obtaining and will publish 100 post-publication reviews. But did it bother getting any pre-publication reviews? It will be shutting down in a few months, after only two years of on-line publication (the 13 'volumes' are really just 13 issues). Its presentation standards are pretty bad - there doesn't seem to have been any effort at copy-editing or formatting the text for publication (not even any page numbers).

Reminds me a bit of Rosie's critique of my final paper, which had to be in the form of a grant application related to the topic of Microbial Sex. Except she was less scathing. At least a little..

UPDATE: I just went and checked out the original article source at  http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html. One look at the design and I had to laugh. It's like the late 90's all over again!