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To: nickcarraway
Piss-poorly written.

"...The El Ali meteorite is composed of more than three hundred unfamiliar IAB elements and iron...."

Idiot drops that sentence into the mix without bothering to explain what IAB elements are, giving some (with a basic knowledge of physical science but no specialization in meteoritics) to believe that the Periodic Table suddenly more than doubled in size. But it's just 300+ extra ingredients among the sub-class of meteorites arbitrarily designated as "IAB," nothing to do new new "elements" in the atomic sense.

What makes a mineral "new" (which he also fails to explain) is a composition and/or crystalline structure never before observed in naturally-occurring materials. The only real news in the entire article but he fails to detail what these new compositions or crystalline structures are.

18 posted on 09/23/2023 11:58:41 AM PDT by Paal Gulli
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To: Paal Gulli
"What makes a mineral "new" (which he also fails to explain) is a composition and/or crystalline structure never before observed in naturally-occurring materials."

Exactly so. These particular compounds are not formed by natural processes on Earth, ergo, we have not seen them yet. Not until a chunk of debris arrived from someplace where those processes do exist.

Also, the author's use of the term 'elements' is grossly incorrect. We have here once again an example of an article on a subject that the writer has a distinct lack of knowledge of. The terminology is therefore a bit, shall we say, "inaccurate".

28 posted on 09/23/2023 1:39:07 PM PDT by Joe Brower ("Might we not live in a nobler dream than this?" -- John Ruskin)
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