I've used maturin for a project and found it surprisingly easy compared to anything with C. I just followed the maturin docs and peaked at a few bigger maturin projects (also linked in the docs).

I'm totally rust-pilled at this point. Never going back to C/C++.

Just remember Venus. The team behind the 2020 phosphine biosignatures claim did way more due diligence to rigorously rule out abiotic sources of phosphine than Madhusudhan et al. have done for DMS on K2-18b.

And yet... it wasn't enough. Because planets are complicated.

DMS has also been found in the interstellar medium and lab studies have shown that it can be produced by striking atmospheric gases with light.

Are comets or interstellar material likely sources of DMS on K2-18b? No.

But that's not the point: these findings show that DMS is not unique to life.

DMS is not unique to life, despite how some media coverage of this finding has been presenting it.

We know it can form in nature in very dead places. Like comets, as I reported last year for @science.org:

www.science.org/content/arti...

Here are some key references in the "no, actually not a Hycean world" camp:

arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05864 - magma ocean, not water ocean

arxiv.org/abs/2401.11082 - gas dwarf mini-Neptune

arxiv.org/abs/2501.18477 - comprehensive re-analysis of the 2023 data disputing several key findings

First and foremost, finding life on an exoplanet on the basis of atmospheric gases is... fraught, to say the least.

To quote @colemathis.bsky.social: a telescope is not a life detector.

More on this in my 2024 story on biosignatures pessimism in @quantamagazine.bsky.social:

shorturl.at/Vul1i

I think this about eco terrorism frequently.

[FOR THE NATIONAL AGENCIES READING THIS I DONT THINK TERRORISM IS GOOD, I JUST WONDER ABOUT HOW THE WORLD IS]

This doesn't include "Life", "Entropy", "Molecules", "Applied Materials", "International Journal of Molecular Sciences" (how is this different from Molecules?), and "Algorithms" which might make some sense in some situations for my work.

I'm getting invitations to special issues that I have no business contributing to (and which even a generous read of my publication history would not suggest I could contribute).

So far I've been requested as a reviewer or contributor at "Galaxies", "Fermentation", "Fractal Fract", and "Diversity"