Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/05/star-jelly-a-mysterious-substance-that-has-confounded-the-best-minds-for-centuries.html
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Following the established medieval principle of “Let’s put it on an open sore. You never know.”.
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I want to know who the first one to try tasting it was, and what they found.
(Come on, you know somebody did. It’s pretty obvious!)
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honestly, that was my first thought, lol. “Star jelly? What does it TASTE like? Does it taste like jelly??”
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I guess we have our first volunteer! 
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Hopefully…
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fair-nuff, but wouldn’t that be ‘simply lousy’ with DNA?
The plot thickens with each new finding, as some samples defy explanation, lacking any DNA at all.
and yet …“some samples”? (if it has DNA then you have a culprit [vertical index finger]). what’s the mass spec look like? ‘jelly’ is going to be longish molecules. longish carbohydrates, protein (~mucus or gelatin), or hydrocarbons …oh my
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If the ozone layer gets any thicker, we’ll be in real trouble.
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“Star jelly” seems to be one of those things that’s actually a number of different phenomena that are superficially similar. Basically any sort of clear gelatinous substance gets called “star jelly,” and only a few are found by someone in a position to have it tested, and those test results, from what I’m reading, aren’t consistent. Some were unambiguously regurgitated frog spawn (having both frog DNA and the DNA of the animal that ate it), in at least one case, there was no detectable DNA. (Though that presumes it was competently tested - plenty of conclusions have been reversed by the later realization that the testing was faulty.) It really doesn’t seem like much testing has actually been done.
Probably don’t want to know…
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Oh hey, I ran across a Librivox recording of an old book chapter about this stuff and turned it into a sort of found poem/song a few years back!
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I love these kind of unexplained mysteries.
The world is full of these wonderful unknowns.
We must cherish them, I suppose, but also celebrate the science, when the secret is revealed.
It reminds me of the mystery of the wandering stones of Death Valley. Mystery of Death Valley's "Wandering Stones" Explained | Scientific American
No less amazing, once.you know the science.
Heres to the mysteries. 
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Colloidal silica gel looks a lot like this. IOW, silicon dioxide (SiO2). Mineralogists say it is a silicate mineral, not an oxide mineral.
Silicate minerals are literally everywhere.
Per the Jimbopedia entry in silica gel, ‘Wet’ silica gel, as may be freshly prepared from alkali silicate solutions, may vary in consistency from a soft transparent gel, similar to gelatin or agar, to a hard solid, namely a water-logged xerogel.
I can see something like this happen now and then spontaneously in the wild when by chance all the relevant parameters just so. It would fit both the “no DNA/organic compounds” and the “goes away after a while on its own” descriptions.
What I can’t see however I look at it is that this notion hasn’t been looked at, extensively, already.
Which probably means this isn’t the explanation either.
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They find the shells in Stone Age caves near the seaside, so I’m guessing it was a very hungry human that tried the first oyster.
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