Kenneth Chang

Can I have his email address? I’d like to complain. That tweet has been up for hours and no one has bothered to delete it/retract. And we wonder why people don’t trust the newspapers and ignorance about science is so high....

The next 3 sentences: “That does not prove that life has ever existed on Mars. The same carbon molecules, broadly classified as organic matter, also exist within meteorites that fall from space. They can also be produced in chemical reactions that do not involve biology.”

The headline in the tweet is plainly false however.

The headline is “Life on Mars? Rover’s Latest Discovery Puts It ‘On the Table’”. That’s not false.

The headline in the tweet says that curiosity discovered molecules produced by living organisms.

Organic molecules are produced by living organisms. Curiosity discovered organic molecules. I agree that if all you read are tweets, you’ll have a misleading, incomplete picture of the news. That’s why I write 1,100-word articles.

Some organic molecules are produced by living organisms. Not all. I appreciate your work on the article but whoever wrote the tweet did you and the discovery a disservice by writing something that wasn’t true.

Indeed, if you look at the other comments on the tweet you’ll see peoples’ reactions are either “oh they found life” or “oh this is false”