Month: June 2019

The LZ Experiment will be the most sensitive instrument ever to probe into the existence and nature of Dark Matter. And just why do we think there even is such a thing as Dark Matter?

(NOTE: Science and Science Fiction is having a few problems right now with its platform program WORDPRESS. One of these problems is that I can’t insert any images into the body of my posts!!!! Right now the IT support at my host IPAGE is working the problem and hopefully they’ll fix the problem soon.

In the meantime however I want to check and see if I can still publish my posts I’m going to try to publish this one without images. Once everything is back to normal I’ll edit the post to add images but until then at least you can still read about the latest in Science and Science Fiction!!!)

Modern physics right now has a couple of big problems that are called Dark Energy and Dark Matter. I say they are big problems because we estimate that they make up more than 95% of the energy in the Universe while we know nothing about them aside from a few educated guesses.

In this post I’ll be discussing Dark Matter and in particular the latest experiment to attempt to detect and learn something about the nature of Dark Matter, the LZ experiment. Before talking about LZ however let’s take a step back and consider some of the evidence that has led physicists and astronomers to even consider the possibility of Dark Matter.

About fifty years ago astronomers began to make careful estimates of the masses of the various galaxies that they were observing in their telescopes. They made these estimates using two different techniques. (In science if you can measure something in two completely different ways and get the same answer from both that’s usually considered strong conformation that you’re getting the right answer!)

The first technique was very straightforward, count, well estimate, the number of stars in the Andromeda galaxy let’s say, and since we know the mass of one star, our Sun, a simple multiplication gives you an estimate of the mass of Andromeda. The second technique employed Newton’s laws of gravitation and required measurements of the velocities at which stars of various distances from the center of their galaxy orbited around that center. Both techniques required an enormous amount of very careful, painstaking measurements and so at first no one was surprised that the initial results were not very close.

As time went on however and the measurements became more accurate the discrepancies didn’t go away. Worse, the results always differed in the same way, that is the Newton’s laws astronomers always had the galaxies weighting more than the astronomers who counted stars, and the ratio between the two groups was always a factor of about six times as much mass as could be seen. It was looking as if there was a lot of matter in galaxies that couldn’t be seen, a lot of Dark Matter!

As astronomers began to consider what this Dark Matter could be made of they first considered fairly normal objects like red dwarf and brown dwarf stars. Red dwarfs are stars that are so small and dim that they are all but invisible at stellar distances while brown dwarfs are even smaller, so small they can’t even start hydrogen fusion in their cores and so are not really stars. They’re bigger than a planet, but not big enough to be true stars. Collectively these objects were called MAssive Compact Halo Objects or MACHOS and large numbers of them, larger than the number of ordinary stars, could account for a sizeable amount of the required Dark Matter in the galaxies.

So astronomers began looking for these MACHOS in our local stellar neighborhood in order to get a measurement of how common they were. In particular the Hubble space telescope was employed in the search but the final results were disappointing. A few brown dwarfs and very small red dwarfs were found, but not nearly in the numbers needed to even double or triple the masses of the galaxies.

It was at this point that the physicists got interested, because some of their theories about sub-atomic particles were indicating that for every particle we knew about, there should be a massive ‘Supersymmetric’ partner that only interacts weakly with other particles. These particles were given the name ‘Weakly Interacting Massive Particles’ or WIMPS and particle physicists were actively searching for these WIMPS in their powerful particle accelerators and other experiments. The possibility that these WIMPS could be the Dark matter astronomers were looking for only increased the effort to detect them. So it is that we come back to the LZ experiment!

The LUX-ZEPLIN or LZ experiment represents a collaborative effort between two previous searches for Dark Matter, the America LUX (Large Underground Xenon) and British ZEPLIN (ZonED Proportional scintillation of LIquid Nobel gasses) experiments. The LZ experiment will be conducted at the Sanford Underground Laboratory 1.5 kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface in the Homestake mine in Lead South Dakota. The LZ experiment like its predecessors LUX and ZEPLIN has to be conducted deep underground in order to minimize the number of false detections caused by cosmic ray particles.

The LZ experiment’s main detector will consist of a vessel containing 7000 kg of liquid Xenon with a small layer of xenon gas at the top while both the top and bottom of the vessel are covered with photomultiplier tubes. Any interaction between a WIMP and a nucleus of a xenon atom will immediately release a few photons of light that will be detected by the photomultiplier tubes. At the same time an electron will be knocked away from the atom. This atom will travel upward due to a uniform electrical field surrounding the xenon container. After a few milliseconds the electron will reach the xenon gas where it will ionize some of the gas atoms releasing more photons that will also be detected by the photomultipliers.

It is this unique signature of a few photons followed a fraction of a second later by more photons that will indicate the detection of a WIMP. There is a problem however; an ordinary neutron passing through the xenon vessel could produce a very similar signal. In order to filter out the false signals from neutrons the entire xenon vessel will be placed inside an outer detector containing 17,000 kg of gadolinium-loaded liquid scintillator (GdLS), which is a neutron absorber, releasing more photons.

So if the outer GdLS detector signals a neutron absorption immediately after the inner xenon detector detects a possible WIMP, that WIMP candidate will have to be rejected as a false event. This shows you the enormous lengths that physicists must go to in order to make absolutely certain that they are detecting just the particle that they are searching for.

The LZ experiment is now under construction and is expected to begin operation in 2020. In a few years then we may hear about the first confirmed detector of a WIMP, we may for the first time observe and learn something about an actual piece of Dark Matter.

 

The Space Race part 7: Why did the Russians lose, in fact, why didn’t they even manage to finish the race?

This is the seventh in a series of posts in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11 and man’s first landing on the Moon. In this post I will discuss the Soviet Union’s Lunar program taking a detailed look at the factors and decisions that not only enabled the American Apollo program to achieve the first landing on the Moon, but which doomed the Russians to never even achieving a Lunar landing.

Actually back during the 1960s the Soviet Union never even admitted to having a Lunar program, they denied they were even in a race. The Americans may have committed themselves to getting to the Moon by 1970, the Russians said, but we will continue to explore space in our own direction at our own pace.

Even after the Apollo landings the Russians did not admit to having lost anything. Oh, they congratulated the Americans for their achievement. At the same time however they maintained that they were concentrating their efforts toward long-term habitation of Low Earth Orbit (LOE), which they did in the 1970s and 80s with their Salyut and Mir space stations. As far as anyone in the west knew for certain, there never was a space race!

The Soviet Union never admitted to having a Lunar Program claiming instead that they were working on their Salyut Space Station. See here with a Soyuz spacecraft docked (Credit: Pinterest)

In fact the Russians were absolutely determined to get to the Moon first, to beat the Americans. In the 1960-62 time frame the Russians were in the lead in space and they fully intended to stay there. The recognition and respect that the Soviet Union had gathered from their achievements in space only made them hungry for more. More than that they had come to regard the new frontier of space as where their Soviet / Communist system would prove its superiority to decadent capitalism. It was only years later, after of collapse of the Soviet Union that the full extent of the Russian Lunar program finally became public.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev saw the Russian dominance in space as proof of the superiority of Communism (Credit: Time Magazine)
One of the problems of the Soviet space program was that their chief designer Sergei Korolev, didn’t get along with Khrushchev (Credit: Roscosmos)

It turned out the Soviet’s had two Lunar programs, and that was probably their first mistake! The larger Russian program was led by their ‘Chief Designer’ Sergei Korolev, the man who had put both Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin into orbit. Korolev knew that he would never have as much money and resources as the United States could spend on Apollo so his plan was a scaled down version of NASA’s program. Korolev’s version of the Saturn V launch vehicle was called the N-1 and would have been capable of sending just about half as much payload out of Earth orbit and on a trajectory to the Moon. See image below.

Russia’s massive N-1 Rocket, second in power only to the Saturn-V. The rocket would fail in all four of it’s attempted launches (Credit: Roscosmos)

Because of the reduced capability of his launch vehicle Korolev had to scale down all of the other components of a Lunar mission. A modified 2-man version of the Soyuz spacecraft would carry two cosmonauts to Lunar orbit from where a single-man Lunar lander would take a lone cosmonaut to the Moon’s surface, see images below.

A two man version of their Soyuz spacecraft would take Russian cosmonauts to the Moon (Credit: mek.kosmo.cz)
A single cosmonaut would make the trip to the Lunar surface aboard this lander (Credit: ninfinger.org)

Imagine for a moment if you will what it would have been like to be that lone human being rocketing down to the Moon’s surface. At least Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren had each other for support as they went ‘where no man had gone before’. The Russian cosmonaut would have been alone as no other human had ever been.

The second Soviet Lunar program was led by Vladimir Chelomei and would not actually have placed a cosmonaut on the surface of the Moon. Instead Chelomei intended to use his large Proton rocket, originally called the UR-500, to send a two-man Soyuz on a single loop journey around the Moon. If you’re wondering why the Soviet government would even fund a program that wasn’t even intended to go all the way well there were two reasons. First unlike the rockets Korolev built that took days to fuel and were unusable as weapons of war, Chelomei promised a large rocket that used storable fuel and that could be converted into an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). Second, let’s just say that Chelomei was better at playing politics, flattering his bosses on the Politburo, one of his chief assistants was actually the son of Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev.

In the long run Chelomei’s Proton rocket did become Russia’s most successful heavy lift launch vehicle, placing into orbit the Salyuts, Mir and even modules of the International Space Station (ISS). During the space race however Chelomei just sucked much needed funds away from Korolev’s program.

Eventually Vladimir Chelomei’s Proton rocket proved to be a successful space launch vehicle but during the space race it was just a distraction. (Credit: Wikidata)

Then in January of 1966 the Soviet program suffered the loss of it’s chief designer as Sergei Korolev died on the operating table after entering the hospital for routine surgery for a bleeding polyp in his large intestine. Now Korolev had been sick for years, ever since being sentenced to a gulag by Stalin, and he’d literally worked himself to exhaustion to keep the Soviet space program on top. The precise effect of the loss of one man cannot ever be known but the fact that the Russian space program would experience several major setbacks in the next few years leaves you to wonder what Korolev would have done if he’d not died.

The first disaster occurred just a year later as the Russians launched their new Soyuz spacecraft on its first mission. A catastrophic entangling of the descent parachutes during the landing resulted in the death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. Since the Soyuz spacecraft was a central component of both Soviet Lunar programs the tragedy of Soyuz one was a major blow.

The crash of the Soviet Soyuz 1 spacecraft (Credit: Roscosmos)

Worse was to come for in 1967 the first two test launches of Chelomei’s Proton launch vehicle both ended in failure while in February of 1969 the first test launch of Korolev’s monster N-1 rocket exploded only seconds after launch.

Test launch of the Russian N-1 Rocket, just seconds before its failure (Credit: Roscosmos)

With the failures of the first tests of the Soviet heavy launch vehicles the race over, Apollo 11 would land successfully on the Moon just five months later. Still, the Russians could have kept trying; coming in second is better than failing to finish isn’t it.

In fact they did keep trying, testing their huge N-1 rocket three more times, with each test resulting in the total destruction of the rocket less than a minute after launch. After the final failure on 23 November of 1972 the entire Soviet Manned Lunar was not only canceled but orders went out to deny that it had ever existed.

So why did the Soviet Union never get to the Moon? Was it the political infighting between two Lunar programs? Was it the death of Korolev? Or did the Americans simply outspend their cold war adversaries? A bit of all three if you want my opinion. As the space race came to its end there was only one competitor left, the first man on the Moon would be an American.

Movie Review: Godzilla, King of the Monsters!

Before I begin with my review of ‘Godzilla, King of the Monsters’ I feel I need to make a full disclosure. Godzilla and I are the same age (His premiere was about a month and a half after mine!) , we’ve known each other a very long time, in fact we grew up on different continents together!

Original Poster for the 1954 Movie Gojira (Godzilla) (Credit: Toho Studios)
For years Godzilla was nothing more than a guy in a rubber suit (Credit: Toho Studios)

O’k, I’ll stop being silly. The plain fact is however that I have seen every Godzilla movie, as a kid I spent many a Saturday afternoon watching monster movies and one of my favourite childhood memories is that of dragging my father to the movie theater to see ‘King Kong versus Godzilla’ back in 1962. So I guess you’d have to say that I’m predisposed to giving a good review to any movie starring Godzilla and his ‘friends’. Hey, just giving you a warning.

Was King Kong versus Godzilla the most titanic fight of all time. As an 8 year old I thought so! (Credit: Toho Studios)

Now the plot of ‘Godzilla, King of the Monsters, that is the story that the human actors are involved in is both convoluted and quite frankly, silly. That’s to be expected, you don’t go to a Godzilla movie to see a well-developed story and good acting, you go to watch the monsters stomp on things and fight each other!

Anyway according to the story it seems that for the last 60 years a secret organization called Monarch has been keeping several dozen ‘titans’ captive. (Why they’re called titans in the movie while the movie’s title explicitly says monsters is never explained!) The only titan not contained by Monarch as the movie begins is Godzilla himself. Anyway the government says the monsters, excuse me, titans are dangerous and should be destroyed.

However there are also those who say it is humanity that is dangerous. We are destroying this planet with our pollution and greenhouse gasses and the titans are Earth’s way of restoring the balance. They want the titan’s released so that they can do their job, what exactly that job is however, is never really explained.

In a Godzilla Movie the humans are really just an afterthought! (Credit: Warner Brothers)

The action of the movie starts when a group of eco-terrorists, with some help from inside Monarch, succeed in stealing a device that allows them to control the titans and they proceed to start to releasing them but something goes wrong. (How could anything go wrong? They’re just releasing dozens of monsters hundreds of meters tall all over the World! Nothing dangerous in that.)

The Eco-Terrorists cause all the trouble (Credit: Warner Brothers)

As I said, you don’t go to a Godzilla movie to see what the humans are doing, you go to watch the monsters fight each other; in particular you go to watch Godzilla fight Ghidorah, the three headed monster. These two monsters have been enemies since 1964 and their enmity for each other hasn’t mellowed with the years. The fights scenes between these two should be the highlights of the movie.

Should be, but it’s precisely here that ‘Godzilla, the King of the Monsters’ disappoints. This movie really needed the absolute best CGI possible in order to make the monsters seem as real as possible. In fact however the CGI in ‘Godzilla, King of the monsters’ is not nearly as good as in the recent ‘Avengers’ or other SF / Fantasy films. A sure sign of this is the way so many scenes are filmed with a bluish hue to them. Studio’s do that in order to cut down on the effort, manpower and computer time, needed to give every different object in a shot it’s own individual colour. Just make everything kinda bluish and it’ll be cheaper!

When Godzilla fights Ghidorah does everything have to be tinted blue? (Credit: Warner Brothers)

Still in the end Godzilla does get to fight Ghidorah and to make things a little interesting their final battle takes place in Fenway Park, home to the Boston Red Sox and famous for its close but tall left field wall known as the ‘Big green Monster’! I hope I’m not giving the movie’s ending away by pointing out that it is called ‘Godzilla, King of the Monsters’.

Rodan (l) and Mothra (r) also appear as Ghidorah’s and Godzilla’s respective sidekicks (Credit: Warner Brothers)

The studio behind ‘Godzilla, King of the Monsters’ is Warner Brothers who hope to create a monster universe similar to Disney’s Marvel universe. ‘King of the Monsters is actually the third film in the series after 2014’s ‘Godzilla’ and 2017’s ‘Kong of Skull Island’. The next film is supposed to be ‘Godzilla versus Kong’, scheduled for release in 2020 but I really hope they put a little more effort into that film. I’d hate to come away from seeing that movie thinking that ‘King Kong versus Godzilla’ from my childhood was a better-made film!

 

 

Would you be willing to eat lab-grown insect meat in order to end World hunger? Some scientists think that might be the way to do it!

Throughout human history it has always seemed as though whenever advances in our technology have allowed us to increase the amount of food we produce, we increase our population just enough to keep a sizable fraction of our species hungry. Today the problem has become even worse as our agriculture is now using up most of the planet’s land area, we are over fishing the oceans, fertilizer runoff into the rivers and oceans is killing aquatic life while raising livestock is a big contributor to global warming. And we still can’t feed all 7 billion of us!

World Hunger Map for 2014 (Credit: Matador Network)

There are several technical advances in agricultural science that have been suggested as possible solutions to this problem: Vertical farming in factories to make better use of the land (see my post of 22 April 2017), Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) to develop crops that grow faster with less water and fertilizer (see my post of 12 January 2019), and cultured meat to eliminate the wastage of producing bones, hide and other unusable parts of an animal (see my post of 7 April 2018).

Vertical Farming can produce many times as much food on the same area as traditional farming (Credit: USDA)
Lab Grown or Cultured meat can also greatly increase the efficiency of food production (Credit: The Atlantic)

An interesting suggestion would be switch meat production from large vertebrate animals like cattle, sheep and pigs and replace it with raising of edible insects! You see a much larger proportion of an insect can actually be eaten than a cow or pig. They have no bones or tough hides; even the exoskeleton of some insects is nourishing. Also Insects are much less finicky about the sort of plant material they consume so they’re actually much more economical to produce per kilogram of edible food.

In many cultures eating insects is very common (Credit: How stuff works)

Now a new article entitled ‘Possibilities for Engineered Insect Tissue as a Food Source’ in the journal ‘Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems’  (and yes this is the first time I’ve ever heard of that journal too!) suggests that the optimal food production strategy would be a combination of all of the possibilities I’ve mentioned above. Vertical farming would be employed to produce the cheapest plant material that would then be fed to genetically modified cultures of insect cells! Such a system, according to lead author Natalie Rubio of Tufts University, would provide the greatest production of food, again on a per kilogram basis, at the lowest cost not only in dollars but also in impact to the environment.

According to Doctor Rubio “Compared to cultured mammalian, avian and other vertebrate cells, insect cell cultures require fewer resources and less energy intensive environmental control as they have lower glucose requirements and can thrive in a wider range of temperature, pH, oxygen and osmolarity conditions.” (By the way osmolarity deals with the process of osmosis, the diffusion of chemical substances through a semi-permeable membrane, which is the way living cells absorb nutrients from their surroundings.)

Of course the big problem with manufacturing insect meat for food is that most people don’t want to eat insects, they’re icky! However that’s the beauty of cultured meat, the product doesn’t have to look like the animal the original muscle cells came from, it can look like whatever the customer likes.

Would you??? (Credit: Slate.com)

So what will insect meat taste like you ask? Well that’s the beauty of genetic modification; it could taste like whatever customers want! As a marketing campaign the name of the ‘product’ could be the Latin taxonomic name. For example Grasshopper meat could be sold as ‘Acrididae’ while ant meat could have a brand name of ‘Formicidae’. To the average shopper they’ll just be meat.

In time people will just get used to manufactured insect meat, especially if it’s cheaper than olde fashioned farm raised beef, pork or chicken. The organizations fighting animal cruelty will love it because no actual animals are really harmed. It sounds like a win-win situation all around.

So, you think that you’ll willing to try some?

Room Temperature Superconducting materials could revolutionize our technology in so many ways but will scientists ever be able to discover one? Also, the end of James Holzhauer’s streak as Jeopardy champion.

Everybody knows that there are some materials, primarily metals, which are able to conduct electricity. At the same time there are other materials like rubber or plastic that are insulators and through which electricity cannot flow. However even the best conductors, such as copper or silver still have a small resistance. Because of this nearly half of all of the electrical power we produce is just eaten up by the resistance in the kilometers of wire that are needed to get electricity from a power plant to your home or office.

Half of all the E;ectrical energy we generate is simply lost in the resistance of the wires needed to transmit it! (Credit: T&D World)

That some materials can become ‘superconductive’, loosing absolutely all of their resistance has been known since physicist Heike Onnes first discovered the phenomenon in 1911. The problem was that the materials Onnes studied only became superconductive at ultra cold temperatures, within just a few degrees of absolute zero (minus 273ºC). Because of the expense of the equipment needed to cool the conducting material down to the low temperatures needed to initiate superconductivity for many years the phenomenon remained a curiosity, of no practical value.

Heike Onnes in his Lab (Credit: American Institute of Physics)

The potential uses of superconductivity are so great however that it’s not surprising that physicists kept looking, trying new materials in their search for a Room Temperature Superconductor (RTS). In fact there has been so much work carried out over the years that six Nobel Prizes have now been awarded for research into superconductivity starting with the one awarded to Onnes himself.

One breakthrough came in the 1980s with the discovery of ceramic conductors, technically known as cuprate-perovskite ceramics. These materials were found to become superconductive at temperatures higher than that of liquid nitrogen, minus 196ºC.

In the Meissner effect a superconducting material is repelled by a magnetic field (Credit: Extreme tech)

With that advance superconductive materials came into some limited technological use, primarily for the generation of powerful magnet fields such as those for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners and magnetic levitation (Mag-Lev) in high-speed trains. These few uses of superconductivity have nevertheless become so economically valuable that they have increased the pace of research toward the discovery of superconducting materials that do not require any cooling at all.

Recently a new high temperature record has been set at the Argonne National Laboratory by a team of scientists from the University of Chicago. The new record is minus 23ºC, considerably higher than the temperature of ‘dry ice’ (solid Carbon Dioxide at minus 78.5ºC). A superconductor that only needs dry ice to cool it could greatly expand the industrial uses of the phenomenon.

Before you start buying stock in superconducting companies however I must tell you that the material, Lanthanum Hydride, formula LaH10 also requires a pressure of 270 Gigapascals or about 2 million atmospheres before it will exhibit superconductivity! In order to attain such a high pressure the tiny sample of material had to be squeezed between two diamond anvils.

X-Ray images of Lanthum Hydro have revealed the structure of the superconducting material (Credit: Drozdov et al)

If you’re thinking that 2 million atmospheres of pressure is a bigger technical problem than low temperature, well you have a point. However the researchers are hoping to find conditions under which the high pressure will initiate superconductivity but where superconductivity will remain once the pressure has been removed!

Whether the University of Chicago scientists succeed in their efforts or not the discovery of a material that is superconductive at temperatures that are commonly seen in the arctic regions of the World is still a major advance. With each step forward science learns a little bit more and perhaps one day soon superconductivity will become as familiar and widespread a property of our technology as semi-conductors are now.

 

Before I leave for today I would like to take a moment to mention the end of Jeopardy contestant James Holzhauer’s 32 game winning streak. Although Holzhauer only won about half as many games as the all time Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings did he still came within $60,000 of Jenning’s all time winnings of over $2.5 million!

James Holzhauer and his 32 game total Jeopardy winnings (Credit: Deadspin)

In other words Holzhauer’s per game winnings were about twice that of Jenning’s, which is what made James a very exciting player to watch. Whenever he got a ‘Daily Double’ he would often bet everything he had even if he already had a comfortable lead!

In the end Holzhauer was beaten by his own style of play. The new Jeopardy champion, Emma Boettcher was playing well but was still a bit behind Holzhauer when she got the last ‘Daily Double’. Following James’ example Boettcher bet everything she had and got the question right, taking a lead she never relinquished. To his credit James quickly congratulated Emma on her victory, indeed throughout his winning streak Holzhauer had often congratulated those opponents who had made him work for his wins!

The Start of James Holzhauer’s final game. Emma beat him! (Credit: IndieWire)

Now of course Jeopardy is just a game show, but at least it’s a game show that requires more than a bit of knowledge and intelligence. I think TV could use more shows like Jeopardy that appeal to our intelligence so I’m glad that James Holzhauer’s reign as Jeopardy champion succeeded in increasing the show’s ratings quite a bit. Hopefully the success of James, and Ken Jennings and Emma Boettcher will inspire a few producers in Hollywood to create a few more shows like Jeopardy for those of us who like to think!

Hundreds of new Species from the time of the Dinosaurs are being discovered in Burmese amber, and why that may not be a good thing!

Ever since prehistoric times amber has been treasured as a rare and beautiful gemstone that we know was used in some of the earliest pieces of jewelry ever made. Amber isn’t actually a stone however; it’s just fossilized tree sap. That is, sap that has dripped down the side of a tree, dried out and become petrified over thousands or more likely millions of years.

Sometimes that tree sap can even capture a small living creature within it before it becomes hard, insects and spiders are the most common victims. And as the sap fossilizes the animal with it can be exquisitely preserved creating some of the best specimens of ancient life known to paleontology. This preservation in amber was even the main plot device in the ‘Jurassic Park’ movies where scientists obtain dino DNA from mosquitoes that have been preserved in amber.

In the Movie ‘Jurassic Park’ the top of Richard Attenborough’s staff was a piece of amber with a mosquito trapped in it (Credit: Daily Mail)

So it’s hardly surprising that paleontologists are always searching for new sources of amber that could contain unknown species from the past. In recent years the best, most interesting fossil amber has come from mines in the province of Kachin in the northeast of the country of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. See map below.

Location of Amber Mines in Kachin Myanmar (Credit: Science)

I have already written a post about one of the most interesting finds discovered in Burmese amber, the tail of a very small dinosaur, with feathers on it. See my post of 16 December 2016 and the image below. Certainly the odds of something so rare happening must be enormous but given millions of years of past history even something that seems next to impossible will eventually occur.

Feathered Tail of a baby Dinosaur found in Burmese Amber (Credit: National Geographic)

The same could be said for a more recent find, the shell of an extinct sea creature known as an ammonite. See image below.

Ammonite shell (lower right) and a lot of other stuff found in Burmese amber (Credit: The Independent)

How could the shell of a creature of the ocean ever get trapped inside the sap from a land tree? Well one clue is that it is only the shell of the animal, all of the soft tissue had decayed before it was encased. Probably the shell was washed up on the shore, perhaps during a storm so that the waves could have could have pushed it fairly far inland, far enough to wind up at the base of a tree that was dripping sap. A one in a billion chance that; again if you wait long enough will happen.

Fossils in amber are also known from other sites around the world such as the Baltic or the Dominican Republic but the amber from Myanmar is both older and for some reason not yet understood, the sap occasionally seems to have trapped larger, stronger, more active creatures such as snakes, lizards and even a few birds. Because of these factors paleontologists are rushing to acquire as much of the Burmese amber as they can.

A few more interesting finds from Burmese amber (Credit: Science)

There is blood on the amber coming from Myanmar however, for the province of Kachin is a conflict zone and the amber mines are controlled by rebels who call themselves the Kachin Independence Army and who are fighting the central government. The situation in Myanmar is very similar to that of the blood-diamonds from Africa in the 1990s where militant insurgents would exploit natural resources in the regions they control in order to fund their rebel armies.

The mines from where Burmese amber comes are dangerous, low paying places to work (Credit: Science)

The same is now happening to the Burmese amber, which is smuggled into nearby China and sold in the markets of cities like Tengchong in Yunnan province. It’s there that paleontologists have to search in order to obtain the scientifically important specimens before they are sold to someone interested only in amber for jewelry.

Buying Burmese Amber that has been smuggled into China (Credit: Science)

In fact no paleontologist or geologist has ever been able to visit one of the amber mines in order to actually determine the precise age of the strata from which the amber comes. Present estimates of 99 million year old are based upon the study of the animals found in the amber and many scientists feel that the amber really has a range of dates.

Obviously this is not a good way to do science. A lot of information about the animal encased in the amber is lost when proper records are not kept. Paleontology is about more than just discovering and describing extinct lifeforms; it’s also about understanding the conditions in which they lived and with what other creatures. All that data is lost when a specimen is smuggled out of a war zone into another country and sold in an open market.

In the years to come I have no doubt that many more fascinating creatures from the age of the dinosaurs will be found in the Burmese amber. How much more could we learn however if scientists could obtain access to the source of the amber and do a proper job of excavation?