Has India been bombarded with life from the Red Rectangle nebula? Picture: NASA Source: NASA

• India experiences "red rain"
• 10-year study findings out today
• Contain life "not seen on Earth"
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ALIEN life may already exist on Earth - us.

There's an idea - common, but not popular in scientific circles - that all life on Earth was seeded from comets, asteroids or meteors which struck the planet and contained the building blocks necessary to kickstart the evolutionary process.

It's called "panspermia" and it caused an all-in boffin barney some 15 years ago when several scientists backed claims there was evidence of life in a Martian meteorite found in the Allan Hills in Antarctica.

It's been proven that life can survive in space, just as it's been proven that the interior of the Mars meteorite never rose above 50C during its journey to Earth.

Unfortunately for alien-spotters, those cells can also be found on Earth, so the argument's never been settled.

Then in July 2001, the rain turned red in India.

And not just red - The Hindu claimed witness reports of yellow, green and black rain in the months that followed.

The first theory to emerge was that it was simply sand or dust picked up from a desert, but a local physicist, Godfrey Louis, found that under a microscope, the water contained cells that looked like bugs.

Five years later, he published a theory suggesting the bugs that turned the rain red in India may have come from a comet that exploded above the Earth and seeded clouds.

Today, after a further four years of studying the cells, joined by a leading panspermia theorist from the UK, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Professor Louis has published claims that they are unlike anything found on Earth.

He says the cells - inert at room temperature - begin to reproduce at 121C.

Within two hours of being exposed to the heat, "daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the number of cells in the samples increases with length of exposure", they say in the new report.

While many spores on Earth can survive that kind of extreme heat, none have yet been discovered that can reproduce in those conditions, much less require it to begin reproducing.

The team also found an unusual pattern in the way the cells changed colour under UV light, known as "fluorescence behaviour".

They said it was "in remarkable correspondence" with red emissions from the Red Rectangle planetary nebula some 2300 light years away, "suggesting, though not proving, an extraterrestrial origin".

While the panspermia angle is already being rejected by the scientific community at large, there's plenty of interest in the final finding of Prof Louis's team - the cells contain no DNA.

"As a biologist, let me assure you that a cell-sized and shaped organism that reproduces, lives off LB and doesn't appear to have any nucleic acid template (DNA or RNA) is a revolutionary discovery in and of itself," one commenter wrote at TechnologyReview.

The only lifeforms that occur on Earth without DNA, according to another commenter, are proteins known as "prions", best known on Earth as the cause of Mad Cow Disease.

The team's findings are yet to be verified.

Unicellular aliens are aliens too!

Singapore Airport

Who cares about delayed flights when you can pass the time riding a 40-foot-tall, jumbo twister slide?

Singapore’s Changi Airport recently unveiled the Slide@T3, the tallest slide in Singapore and, for the record, in any airport around the world. The attraction is the latest addition to a long list I like to call, “ridiculously amazing things to have in an airport,” including a movie theater, a rooftop swimming pool, and the Butterfly Garden (which is also home to a collection of 200 carnivorous or insectivorous plants).

For every $22 spent in the airport, adrenaline junkies (or really brave little kids) get tokens for two rides on the slide. Visitors who don’t want to travel at the speed of 19 feet a second, can take a ride down the shorter, one-and-a-half-story tall slide located at Terminal 3 Basement 2, which is free.

For a snapshot of the slide ride, check out the video (complete with jazzy music) below.

Well played Singapore airport. A cinema, a swimming pool, a butterfly garden and now... a chute?

Why don't more airports invest in keeping people entertained? No, not terrible internet or outdated arcade machines. Something fun and unique. Not only would it raise customer satisfaction, but it's a good business opportunity.

Take note Heathrow. Nevermind new runways and efficiency, this is what will make me come to your airport! If you're going to delay my flight... come on, amuse me!

Best mashup of the week... perhaps?

+VIBES_-_Get_That_Dirt_Off_Your_Pipes_(Ratatat_vs._Jay-Z).mp3 Listen on Posterous