Clearly they didn't see the movie Life.
Nasa revives 'weird life forms' trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: Nasa revives 'weird life forms' trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years
#22Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years exploring Mexico's Naica Mine in Chihuahua looking for extremophiles, which contain caves as large as cathedrals. Is it just because English isn't my first language, or does that sentence sound weird to native speakers too? Like the extremophiles contain "caves as large as cathedrals"
Native speaker here. For what it's worth, I understood it perfectly. And so did you. It's not possible for extremophiles to contain caves, so obviously you know what they mean. Much of English is like this in informal conversation, and informal conversation is arguably the best way to write.
Native speaker here. Having not previously known what extremophiles are, I had to read it three times to convince myself they couldn't contain caves.
Geology has a certain reputation for its vocabulary https://xkcd.com/1829/
Re: Nasa revives 'weird life forms' trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years
#23Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years exploring Mexico's Naica Mine in Chihuahua looking for extremophiles, which contain caves as large as cathedrals. Is it just because English isn't my first language, or does that sentence sound weird to native speakers too? Like the extremophiles contain "caves as large as cathedrals"
Native speaker here. For what it's worth, I understood it perfectly. And so did you. It's not possible for extremophiles to contain caves, so obviously you know what they mean. Much of English is like this in informal conversation, and informal conversation is arguably the best way to write.
I disagree that informal conversation is the best way to write. If you're going to write an article, you should convey the ideas in the article as clearly and smoothly as possible. In informal conversation there are tonal and visual cues. In an article all we have is words, so use them correctly.
Re: Nasa revives 'weird life forms' trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years
#24Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years exploring Mexico's Naica Mine in Chihuahua looking for extremophiles, which contain caves as large as cathedrals. Is it just because English isn't my first language, or does that sentence sound weird to native speakers too? Like the extremophiles contain "caves as large as cathedrals"
You're not wrong: it is broken English and parses incorrectly vs its intended meaning.
Should be "...team have spent years looking for extremophiles, exploring Mexico's Naica Mine in Chihuahua, which contain caves as large as cathedrals."
Or split into two sentences.
Re: Nasa revives 'weird life forms' trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would also be clearer if "looking for extremophiles" were moved to an earlier position in the sentence. Here's how I would word it: Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years looking for extremophiles in the Naica Mine. The mine, located in Chihuahua, Mexico, contains caves as large as cathedrals.
This is tangential at best, but a) I've been thinking about it for some time and b) someone reading this thread may actually know: why are there differences in punctuation rules between languages? Comma placement before certain words in a particular situation, hyphen-related rules, quoting, and so on - there may be differences even within a single language, and differences between languages are even bigger. How come?…
Most punctuation was developed before any standardization efforts, so every language has rules that reflect whatever the most influential writers believed to be natural
Quotation marks differ because the transition from handwriting to printed letters solidified different shapes like ", «, „ or “, depending on how the strokes were jotted down in handwritten text.
Re: Nasa revives 'weird life forms' trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would also be clearer if "looking for extremophiles" were moved to an earlier position in the sentence. Here's how I would word it: Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years looking for extremophiles in the Naica Mine. The mine, located in Chihuahua, Mexico, contains caves as large as cathedrals.
This is tangential at best, but a) I've been thinking about it for some time and b) someone reading this thread may actually know: why are there differences in punctuation rules between languages? Comma placement before certain words in a particular situation, hyphen-related rules, quoting, and so on - there may be differences even within a single language, and differences between languages are even bigger. How come?…
I think of it as similar to HTML vs CSS: words are the content, punctuation marks are an attempt to mark up a suggestion of how to present them. (Where I'm including whitespace in punctuation)
Re: Nasa revives 'weird life forms' trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years
#27Re: Nasa revives 'weird life forms' trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years
#28What could go wrong?
Not nearly as much as you're implying
The storyline, and even the first picture do mirror a lot of doomsday/virus/zombie/etc plots. I'm sure that occurs to just about everyone that reads it.
A pointer to some credible source as to why it's not dangerous might be interesting.
Even being somewhat reasonable, scary things like prions do exist.
Re: Nasa revives 'weird life forms' trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years
#29Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years exploring Mexico's Naica Mine in Chihuahua looking for extremophiles, which contain caves as large as cathedrals. Is it just because English isn't my first language, or does that sentence sound weird to native speakers too? Like the extremophiles contain "caves as large as cathedrals"
You're not wrong: it is broken English and parses incorrectly vs its intended meaning. Should be "...team have spent years looking for extremophiles, exploring Mexico's Naica Mine in Chihuahua, which contain caves as large as cathedrals." Or split into two sentences.
Contains too
Re: Nasa revives 'weird life forms' trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years
#30Disappointed - not much on why these life forms are "weird".