Remember in the movie Jurassic Park where Richard Attenborough tells Sam Neil et al that his scientists obtained Dino DNA from prehistoric mosquitoes that had been encased in amber. Well wouldn’t it be better just to have the dinosaur itself be encased in amber, or at least a part of one. Well it’s happened, a Chinese paleontologist named Xing Lida found the remarkable specimen in an amber market in northern Myanmar.
Feathered Dinosaur Tail encased in Amber
The specimen is just a portion of the tail of a very small dinosaur, and it’s covered in feathers. Now, it’s not a bird, X-rays revel that the tail bones are arranged differently than those in birds. In fact paleontologists have identified the fragment as belonging to a member of the coelurosaurian group and therefore a relative of the Mighty T-Rex and the well known velociraptors. Although this animal probably only grew to the size of a small bird.
Artists Impression of Bird sized Dinosaur
Researchers haven’t been able to obtain any DNA but they have found soft tissue and decayed blood. This specimen has already given scientists a better idea of how dinosaurs, at least some, where covered in feathers rather than scales making them better able to control their body temperature and could provide the final proof that at least some dinosaurs were warm blooded.
Looking for ordinary fossils is like looking for a needle in a haystack but trying to find such spectacular specimens in amber is certainly needle in a haystack squared. Nevertheless you can be confident that dino hunters out there will be on the lookout and before to long maybe they will find that one specimen that does give us our first actual sample of Dino DNA.
P.S. A couple of posts back I talked a little bit about Cosmic Inflation after the Big Bang and how some cosmologists, and me, think that a simpler model is to look at the Big Bang as a Big Bounce from a previously contracting Universe. Well, Nova Next from PBS just released an article which goes deeper into that very subject. If you’re as interested as I am you can check it out by clicking below.
I have something really exciting to talk about today; batteries! What’s that you say, batteries aren’t exciting. Well, consider this, how much time do you spend recharging the battery in your smart phone and how often are you not able to get the latest scores from it because your battery is low.
Think of how many more electric cars there’d be on the road today if they could go further than a hundred miles before having to spend six hours or more recharging. Over the last two decades solar and wind power production technology has made rapid progress but green energy is still being held back by the problem of storing that energy for use during the night or when the wind is calm. The only solution at present is a huge bank of batteries that costs more than the solar arrays or wind turbines producing the energy.
The plain fact is that over the past one hundred years to only real advance in battery technology is the development of the Lithium battery which we all know from the news are prone to catch fire if you ask them for just a wee bit too much current. Really battery performance has become the limiting factor in the progress of many technologies that are otherwise ready to emerge into our daily lives.
Which gets me back to where I started. I have something really exciting to talk about today; batteries!
The first new development I’d like to discuss comes from a story in the magazine of the Institute of Electricians and Electrical Engineers, IEEE Spectrum and reports on research into Lithium-Sulfur batteries. Lithium Sulfur has the potential ability to hold five times the energy of current Lithium-Ion batteries but their performance has so far decayed rapidly every time they are recharged. The new research is led by Professor Guihua Yu at the University of Texas at Austin and has succeeded in encapsulating the Sulfur electrodes in polypyrrole-manganese dioxide nanotubes. While that is a bit beyond the chemistry I learned it has succeeded in reducing the loss of battery performance to 0.07 percent per charge cycle.
There are still some problems to be resolved, especially the tendency of the Lithium and Sulfur to develop dendrites that can short circuit the battery but hopefully Lithium Sulfur batteries will soon reach the stage where their greater capacity can attain widespread use.
To read the original article in IEEE Spectrum click on the link below.
The second story come from Merry Olde England where the daily express is reporting on the research of Dr. Brendan Howlin from the University of Surry and actually deals with what is claimed as a major breakthrough in the development of Supercapacitors rather than familiar chemical batteries.
Now, the chemical compounds that ordinary batteries use to store energy simply do not react as fast as electronic components like a transistor, that is why batteries take to long to charge and why their discharge currents are so limited. A capacitor however stores its energy in electric charge, actual electrons, and even a huge capacitor back can be fully charged, or discharged in less than a second. Until now however the amount of energy a capacitor could store was tiny compared to that of a chemical battery. Capacitors were great for small amounts of energy in an instant but simply could not hold enough energy for phones or drones or similar uses.
Doctor Howlin however, reports that he has increased the amount of energy his supercapacitors can store by a factor of 1,000-10,000 using the same materials used in soft contact lenses. If this is true, Doctor Howlin’s capacitors could allow electric cars to travel just as far as gasoline powered cars and be recharged just as quickly as pumping gas. Elon Musk of Tesla electric cars has often said that supercapacitors with this performance are the breakthrough electric cars have been waiting for.
To read the original story from the express click on the link below.
P.S. Before I go today I have to take a moment to mention the passing on Thursday of John Glenn. I was seven years old and in second grade on February 20th, 1962 when John became the first American to orbit the Earth. My class at Thomas Holme School was allowed to go to the school auditorium to watch the mission on a small TV placed on the auditorium stage. I may not have been able to see much but I will never forget that. There can never be any doubt that John Glenn was an example of the best of what the Human Race can be. Godspeed John Glenn.
Several news stories dealing with space exploration came out this week but didn’t receive much attention so I decided to take a moment to highlight them.
The first item on my list is the beginning of the final, and perhaps most exciting phase of the Cassini spacecraft’s mission to the planet Saturn. The Cassini mission is expected to end in September of next year with Cassini plunging into Saturn’s atmosphere but starting this week the spacecraft has begun a series of ring grazing orbits that will be followed by orbits closer to the giant planet than anything ever attempted.
In the picture below the gray lines indicate the ring grazing orbits while the blue lines are the planet grazing orbits. These orbits are dangerous, a collision with debris from the rings could easily destroy the spacecraft which is why NASA has waited till the end of the mission to attempt them. The possibility of close up observations of the ring system is too great a chance to miss however.
Cassini Spacecraft Ring grazing Orbits
Hopefully in the next several weeks NASA will be able to release spectacular images of Saturn’s Rings. If you’d like to know more about the Cassini mission here’s a link to the official NASA website.
Another interesting NASA story is the awarding of a contact to the California based company Space Systems/LORAL. I used to work for them back in the 1980s designing antennas for geostationary communications satellites. The contact is for the development of a satellite refueling spacecraft called the Restore-L spacecraft bus.
Refueling satellites in space is an idea that’s been talked about since the 80’s and I’m glad to see they are finally getting around to doing it. You see, all the satellites we put into space to sent you your direct TV signal or complete your overseas telephone call or keep an eye on the hurricane brewing in the Atlantic have only a limited amount of fuel to keep them in the proper orbit and, just as importantly pointing in the right direction. Once their fuel is gone these technological miracles costing hundreds of millions of dollars are just trash.
Having an unmanned spacecraft that could go to these satellites and refuel them is another step on the road to building the infrastructure of space, turning low Earth orbit (LEO) into a work environment of benefit to everyone here on Earth. If you’d like to read more about Restore-L here’s a link to the story.
A closely related story is the selection by INTELLSAT, the international consortium managing most of the world’s communications satellites, of Orbital ATK as the provider for a Mission Extension Vehicle-1, MEV-1. The objective of the MEV-1 will be very similar to NASA’s Restore-L spacecraft in that the MEV-1 will go to satellites already in orbit and either refuel or repair them, thereby extending their useful life.
These twin spacecraft, are scheduled to be developed over the next three to four years and together they will provide a new capability for mankind in space. To read the original story from Spacecraft Insider click on the link below.
Over the past week there have been a series of news articles reporting that two physicists, Niayesh Afshordi at the University of Waterloo in Canada along with Joao Magueijo at the Imperial College of London have proposed that Einstein may have been wrong. The Speed of Light may not be constant, right after the Big Bang it may have been a lot faster.
Do you want the short answer or the long answer. For the short answer read the next 3 paragraphs, for the long answer keep going. If you want to read the news report use the link below.
What Afshordi and Magueijo were looking for is a solution to the problem in cosmology of just how the early universe was in such good thermal equilibrium as is evidenced by the Cosmic Microwave Background, CMB see picture below. For different objects, at different initial temperatures to come into thermal equilibrium requires some kind of contact between those different objects. In this case we are taking about the entire early Universe which is flying apart at the speed of light and that ain’t good contact.
Cosmic Microwave Background from Plank Satellite
What Afshordi and Magueijo have proposed is that, in the Early Universe the speed of light was far greater than it is now allowing greater thermal contact by the process of radiation. Remember there are three ways for heat to flow: conduction, convection and radiation, well Afshordi and Magueijo’s model would make radiation a much more efficient process thereby eliminating the thermal contact problem.
The point to remember here is that this is all mathematics at present, no one has measured a different value for the speed of light. Afshordi and Magueijo do make a prediction of the scalar fluctuations in the CMB as an experimental check but at the moment this is all just a model.
Also, we’ve been here before. The problem of thermal equilibrium in the CMB goes back to the 1970s when Alan Guth of MIT proposed cosmic inflation as the solution. The idea of inflation was that, right after the big bang itself, and we’re taking pico-seconds here, a huge amount of energy was dropped into the universe causing it to expand faster than the speed of light so that a small section of the universe that was in thermal equilibrium became the entire universe that we see. For thirty years after Guth published his model inflation was a standard part of cosmology, I learned it, but no one has been able to figure out where all that energy came from so inflation is no longer quite so highly regarded.
To me however, this new idea of Afshordi and Magueijo is just kind of the opposite of inflation. Instead of having a small part of the universe after the big bang expand faster than the speed of light they increase the speed of light, in a sense making the early universe smaller. And they now have the problem of describing what made the speed of light so different, and what makes it so constant now? Kind of the opposite of Guth’s problem of where all that energy came from. I wish Afshordi and Magueijo luck but as I said, we’ve been here before.
Now I get to give my opinion. To me the reason the early universe was in thermal equilibrium right after the big bang was that it was in thermal equilibrium before the big bang. That’s right I’m one of those big crunch guys, that is I think that about 15 billion years ago, before the big bang, the universe was collapsing at the speed of light. Eventually the universe collapsed as much as it could and then rebounded, that rebound is what we call the big bang. A universe that is collapsing is coming into greater contact and therefore will achieve thermal equilibrium before the rebound, giving it thermal equilibrium after the rebound.
Anyway, that’s what I think. I know this has been a bit of a long post but I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what you think.
I have a big problem with this Movie! The alien visitors are not only smart enough to span interstellar space and come to Earth they are smart enough to have a deeper understanding of time than we do. And when they arrive on Earth they know that we are a divided species, they seem to know something of our physiology and technology. Yet somehow they haven’t managed to learn English or any other Earth language, nor do they manage to do so by the end of the movie. Seriously, at the film’s climax Amy Adams is trying to get the big message across to them using their language!
I had the same problem with Close Encounters of the Third Kind back in 1977, I know that’s almost heresy but it’s true. In CE3K the aliens have been watching us since at least Dec1945 when they abducted Navy flight 19 but in the next 32 years they haven’t learned English! I’m sorry but that really ruined CE3K for me and it pretty much ruins Arrival.
I remember the old 1950 Film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” where at the beginning of the movie the Alien Klaatu walks out of his flying saucer speaking perfect English. He explains this by announcing that “they” have been listening in on our radio and TV broadcasts. Which is probably how any aliens would learn about our existence in the first place.
Arrival’s best part is in fact where Amy Adams learns the aliens written language where every word is based on a circle (see example below). They state in the film that this makes every word a palindrome, a word that is spelled the same backwards and forwards, but if you look at the example that’s not true, the alien symbol is different depending on whether you go around the circle clockwise or counter-clockwise.
Example of Alien Language in Arrival
As to the Aliens of Arrival themselves, they aren’t very interesting. They look pretty much like octopuses that have lost one tentacle and we don’t get to see a great deal of their technology. The film is really more about how we humans react to the arrival of aliens than the aliens themselves. In that case however “Arrival” spends too much time with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner and we only get snippets of news reports on how humanity as a whole is reacting.
Serious Science Fiction movies are rare and need to be supported but I just can’t give it my wholehearted approval. It’s not bad, it’s just not very alien. The scriptwriters needed to spend more time on the aliens and not just their language. Well, that’s my opinion, what’s yours?
Some holidays are religious, some are patriotic but let’s be honest, Thanksgiving is all about the food. So tomorrow, as we wait impatiently for ma, or grandma, to perform that wonderful miracle in the kitchen maybe we should all take a moment to think about chemistry, that’s right chemistry.
Cooking is really just practical organic chemistry after all. Consider the changes your turkey will go through as the heat of your oven makes it so delicious. The muscle proteins will coagulate making them easier to digest, the carbohydrates in the skin will caramelize making it nice and crispy while the lipids will liquefy making everything wonderfully moist.
Heat is also important in preparing our vegetables, breaking down the tough cellulose cell walls. If you boil your potatoes don’t forget to salt the water, and not just for taste. Salt also raises the boiling temperature of water and is simply a good catalyst speeding up many chemical reaction.
Besides heating there are other important cooking techniques as well. Consider making a nice vinaigrette for your salad. Now we all know that oil and water don’t mix but if you employ mechanical agitation, shake them or stir with a whisk, you can produce thousands of little oil bubbles suspended in the vinegar. This is called an emulsion and here’s a little secret, add a teaspoon of mustard before you shake. The proteins in the mustard dissolve in the vinegar but can hook onto one of those oil drops helping to keep the emulsion from separating. The mustard also adds a lot of flavor.
Perhaps the most complex chemistry performed in the kitchen involves yeast. Yeast are living cells of a fungal organism and their metabolism is as complex as any creatures but we humans use then basically for two purposes. When added to a mixture of carbohydrates and lipids, flour and butter, the yeast will produce carbon dioxide bubbles making the bread dough rise. The other use is to produce alcohol from simple sugars giving us the nice glass of Riesling I plan on having with my turkey.
Yes, a delicious meal is really just better living through chemistry. Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
Recently there have been a few stories about a scientific project to learn more about the asteroid that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Researchers Joanna V. Morgan of the Imperial College of London and Sean P. S. Gulick of the University of Texas at Austin have been drilling thirty kilometers off the Yucatán peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico looking for the inner “peak” ring inside the larger crater rim caused by the asteroid that struck Earth 66 million years ago. To see the original article in Science click the link below.
These inner rings of craters have been often seen on our Moon and other Planets and moons in the solar system but where unknown here on Earth before now. With the samples of granite and other materials retrieved by the scientists we are now able to study this type of crater formation up close.
The present model for the formation of these double ringed craters is shown in the figure below.
Double Ringed Crater Formation
Data and samples gained from the present drilling project will help to either confirm or reject the current model.
Like the dinosaurs, we are still threatened by another such disastrous collision from outer space. Unlike them however we are beginning to develop the necessary technology to recognize the threat before it strikes and someday soon to prevent the disaster from occurring.
Quick update: Just this morning a new article in Live Science has reported that the scientists drilling into the Yucatan crater believe that the asteroid may have actually punctured the Earth’s crust. If that is true some of the samples the team are finding may be material from the Earth’s mantel, a region of our planet less well explored than our Moon. Use the link below to read the article.
Last Night the National Geographic Channel debuted the first episode of it’s new six part miniseries “Mars” from Producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. Formatted as a dramatization of the first voyage to Mars the program adds in comments from some of the scientists and engineers who are working to make that first voyage actually happen.
In the first episode we were introduced to the international team of six men and women who will take the spaceship “Daedalus” to Mars. Last night’s episode concentrated in the difficulties and dangers of the actual landing on the red planet. Without giving away to much, a life threatening malfunction occurs, the mission commander is injured while fixing the problem enabling the Daedalus to land safely.
It appears to me that the plot for each episode will resemble last night’s in examining one aspect of the voyage to Mars, adding in an emergency and letting the crew survive by their technical skill and courage. My biggest criticism of last night’s episode would be the sound, with the crew’s helmets on and all of the background noise I never did get to hear what the malfunction actually was.
The interspersed comments from the scientists included Elon Musk the CEO of Space X corporation, Neil deGrasse Tyson the Director of the Hayden Planetarium and host of Star Talk, Andy Weir the author of “The Martian” along with my favorite astronaut (I met him once) Jim Lovell and a host of other scientists. In general the commentators succeeded in informing rather than interfering but towards the end I almost got the feeling I was watching a commercial for Space X.
We’ll see how future episodes go, I’ll certainly be watching. National Geographic has announced that they plan on producing more series like Mars and less of the the Tuna Fishing, Surviving in the wild with nothing but a camera crew to help type of reality show and I for one appreciate the change.
After the premier of Mars came the weekly installment of Star Talk with the aforementioned Neil deGrasse Tyson. Doctor Tyson’s guests were the aforementioned Andy Weil along with NASA Engineer Adam Steltzner the team leader on the Mars Curiosity Rover’s sky crane landing system and Jim Green, NASA’s lead planetary scientist. As you might guess the discussions were all about Mars without making an explicit tie in to the miniseries.
Television was once described by Newton N. Minow as a “Vast Wasteland”. Well last night the wasteland of Mars gave us some of the best TV I’ve seen in quiet a long while.
The Marvel Universe has released its latest comic to movie superhero in Doctor Stephen Strange. Marvel has certainly developed a winning structure for action movies and while Doctor Strange may not be a high point in the Marvel Universe it was still an entertaining installment.
The biggest problem is the first third of the movie, where noted neurosurgeon Doctor Strange has a car accident, injuring his lifesaving hands. Abandoning western medicine he seeks a cure in eastern mysticism, becoming a super magician, and learning the truth about himself in the process
What we get is simply trite. We’ve seen all this before and the comparisons to other movies are so easy to make. I’ll use Star Wars as an example. Tilda Swinton is the Yoda character, Chiwetel Ejiotor and Benedict Wong share the Obi Wan duties while Benedict Cumberbatch is of course Luke Skywalker. There are scenes of Luke…er, Stephen in training along with the required ‘wise’ sayings stressing how no sense makes sense.
As you can tell from the cast the acting is excellent, only Mads Mikkelsen in the Darth Vader role is unconvincing, and to be honest he has very little to work with aside from just being the baddie. The special effects are also high quality. The bending of reality does manage to generate a genuine feeling of vertigo.
The film picks up a bit of steam when Strange’s artifact finds him. A mage doesn’t find his artifact, it finds him. Again, that’s a little trite. I won’t give away the ending except to say it was the best part of the film with Strange being clever in defeating his foe rather than just another fight scene.
I’m not saying Doctor Strange was a bad film, it just needed a good bit more care in the early part of the script. If you’re looking for something thought provoking, or even just clever plot twists you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re just looking for an enjoyable night’s entertainment Doctor Strange will do the trick.
Oh, and one last thing. Since Doctor Strange will be an integral part of the Marvel Universe, ya kinda have to see this this movie in order to keep up with what’s going on in the rest of MU. Clever boys there at Marvel aren’t they.
P.S. Monday night, 14Nov16, the National Geographic channel will debut the first installment of its six part miniseries ‘Mars’. You can bet I’ll be watching, and posting!
Just finished reading the new (Aug16) novel “On to the Asteroid” by Travis S. Taylor and Les Johnson, a hard science look at space travel about twenty years from now. If you’re like me and are anxious for humanity to return to the Moon, get going on exploring Mars and begin living, working and profiting from space I can recommend “On to the Asteroid” without reservation.
The basic plot, a runaway asteroid is going to strike the Earth is actually the weakest element of the entire book. We’ve seen all this before whether in novels, Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Hammer of God” or movies “Meteor”, “Armageddon” and Deep Impact” and I’m sure I’ve missed a few. That said “On to the Asteroid” is a thrill ride in a high-tech spaceship with plenty of plot twists, a homicidal maniac along with harrowing escapes from certain death.
The Authors, Travis S. Taylor and Les Johnson certainly know their science and technology. Taylor is an aerospace engineer, author and appears in National Geographic Channels “Rocket City Rednecks” while Les Johnson is a physicist who works for NASA at their Advanced Concepts Office so you know the science is done with three digit accuracy. Like Andy Weir’s “The Martian” the science of “On to the Asteroid” is the solid foundation of an adventure unlike anything anyone has yet experienced.
“On to the Asteroid” is a quick read, it took me two days to finish. It reminds me somewhat of the Dan Brown novels that have something happen every page which keeps you turning to the next page. I’m not going to spoil the ending or anything but “On to the Asteroid” is a roller coaster ride that will keep you in suspense till the very end.
“On to the Asteroid” isn’t either philosophical nor psychological. It isn’t great literature, but it is what science fiction has always done best, it takes you to other worlds!
