It's a sad day that even NASA has to use clickbait titles.
The title is factually correct but it's not very representative of the actual content.
A more appropriate title would be NASA confirms predicted levels of organic carbon in martian soil and long term measurements help scientists identify possible cyclic releases of methane on mars.
Organic molecules are common as hell in space including fairly complex ones, asteroids, comets and space dust are rich in them as well as many other "complex" molecules like ammonia based ones are also everywhere.
Hydrogen is the most common element, Oxygen is the 3rd most common one, Carbon is the 4th and Nitrogen is the 7th and Sulfur is the 10th.
Hydrocarbons are common, ammonia based compounds are common, heck cosmic clouds of sulfuric acid are common.
At this point the main study in Cosmobiology is to figure out how to look for life in an organic rich environment since the amount of it in space is essentially blinds us and effectively made us throw out all of our assumptions out of the window.
So what we left is to either try to identify some cyclic processes in these organic rich environments that cannot be explained by any other means (e.g. the methane, although more likely than not it's tied the temperatures during the summer one way or another).
And look at the inorganic and complex organic processes such as minerals that may indicate life and the search for much more complex organic compounds like uric acid and urea since we've identified microbes, fungi and other types of life with uric acid and urea pathways where's it was previously thought that only vertebrates (excluding fish) and mammals (respectively) had these pathways.
If they wrote Organic Molecules people wouldn't know what to think either, when it comes to clickbait, this is quite off-white area still.
> NASA confirms predicted levels of organic carbon in martian soil and long term measurements help scientists identify possible cyclic releases of methane on mars
This is a general public press release (besides being 80 characters to long for a HN news headline), not a scientific paper. Also NASA's existence is quite directly releated to how many people think it's important. As long as science need PR to get funded, this type of headline and artistic renderings are the lessest of all evils.
I understand why they are doing it I just don’t think this one was very appropriate title, especially considering the content and the average “layman” who will read a NASA press release directly.
Would potentially live enabling matter be precise enough? I just think the adjective organic alone is too overloaded with all kinds meaning. Even organic molecule is just historic and obsolete when it comes to being descriptive.
I kept organic because NASA used it.
While this is a broad press release this isn’t exactly for TMZ I wouldn’t mind say PopSci running this story with a title saying “NASA confirms expected levels of Carbon on mars and discovers new phenomena that may indicate life”.
The title they chose was simple not well it’s meh.
They tied a “simple” adjective to a more complex term as in Ancient Organic Material and Mysterious Carbon that’s the clickbaity part and it’s not even that good as a clickbait as you said.
This isn’t about science being boring this isn’t actually boring news it’s just a weird title because it doesn’t try to dumb things down as much as as just being dumb.
Anyone who understands what Organic or Methane is doesn’t really care of the Ancient or Mysterious adjectives used to describe them in the title anyone who would be appealed by these adjectives likely as mentioned above doesn’t understand what these adjectives describe.
The title is factually correct but it's not very representative of the actual content.
A more appropriate title would be NASA confirms predicted levels of organic carbon in martian soil and long term measurements help scientists identify possible cyclic releases of methane on mars.
Organic molecules are common as hell in space including fairly complex ones, asteroids, comets and space dust are rich in them as well as many other "complex" molecules like ammonia based ones are also everywhere.
Hydrogen is the most common element, Oxygen is the 3rd most common one, Carbon is the 4th and Nitrogen is the 7th and Sulfur is the 10th.
Hydrocarbons are common, ammonia based compounds are common, heck cosmic clouds of sulfuric acid are common.
At this point the main study in Cosmobiology is to figure out how to look for life in an organic rich environment since the amount of it in space is essentially blinds us and effectively made us throw out all of our assumptions out of the window.
So what we left is to either try to identify some cyclic processes in these organic rich environments that cannot be explained by any other means (e.g. the methane, although more likely than not it's tied the temperatures during the summer one way or another).
And look at the inorganic and complex organic processes such as minerals that may indicate life and the search for much more complex organic compounds like uric acid and urea since we've identified microbes, fungi and other types of life with uric acid and urea pathways where's it was previously thought that only vertebrates (excluding fish) and mammals (respectively) had these pathways.