Category: Science

The Space Race part 8: Apollo 11 and the fulfillment of mankind’s age-old dream of traveling to the Moon.

This is the eight and final post in a series celebrating the fiftieth anniversary man’s first landing on the Moon. In this post I will discuss the mission of Apollo 11 and the contribution of all of those who contributed to the achievement of mankind’s oldest, greatest dream.

We will never know who was the first human to dream about going to the Moon but surely that is one of humanity’s oldest desires! (Credit: NASA)

Whoever was the first human being to imagine going to the Moon is lost in the mists of prehistory but we know that the Roman poet Lucretius wrote a story about traveling to the Moon in a dream during the first century BCE. Other similar dream like stories where occasionally written during the next sixteen hundred years before the French author Cyrano de Bergerac penned the first non-supernatural trip to the Moon around 1662. In Cyrano’s ‘Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon’ the trip from Earth was made using balloons and, get this, rockets!

Cover of a modern edition of Cyrano de Bergerac’s ‘A Voyage to the Moon” (Credit: Barnes and Noble)

Starting in the late 19th century the pace of Moon travel stories picked up with Jules Verne and H. G. Wells penning the best-known novels. 20th century stories about going to the Moon are too numerous to mention but you take my point, people have been wondering about the Moon, dreaming about what it would be like to travel there ever since we’ve been human. Indeed, in my own opinion, the sense of wonder and mystery that we feel when we look up at the night sky is the key difference between our animal ancestors and ourselves.

Starting in the early 20th century there were other sorts of dreamers thinking about the Moon, dreamers with training in mathematics or engineering. Men like Constantine Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard and Herman Oberth who began to consider how a trip into outer space could actually be accomplished. Men who began working on the designs and technology of the rockets that would be needed to take a man to the Moon.

Left to Right Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth (Credit Public Domain)

In my previous posts about the Space Race I’ve mentioned the names of Werner von Braun and Sergei Korolev as the two men who built the rockets that took us into space and it’s worth noting that van Braun knew Oberth very well and Korolev read all of Tsiolkovsky’s writings as a student in the Soviet Union.

So it was that during the middle of the 20th century the technology needed to reach the Moon was within reach. Getting to the Moon was going to take more than just good engineers however; it was going to take money, lots of it, and the political will to provide that money.

Enter the space race, a contest of will between the two opposing superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. A test of two ideologies each determined to prove to the rest of the world that their way of life was superior. As I have written in my earlier posts, the race began when the Russians succeeded in surprising the world by launching Sputnik before the Americans even attempted to put a satellite into space.

When President Kennedy announced NASA’s goal of reaching the Moon he didn’t explicitly give the space race a finish line, the Russians never admitted to being in the race after all. Nevertheless the race was on and by the beginning of 1969 the Americans were on the verge of meeting Kennedy’s challenge while the Soviet Union’s space program was beset with a string of failures.

John F. Kennedy gives the United States the goal of sending a man to the Moon! (Credit: NASA)

Which brings me to Apollo 11 and its crew of Neil Armstrong, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins. Armstrong and Aldrin would be the two astronauts who would make the final descent and landing in the Lunar Module (LM) while Collins remained aboard the Apollo Command and Service Modules (CSM) in Lunar orbit.

The Crew of Apollo 11. Left to right Armstrong, Collins ans Aldrin (Credit: NASA)

The mission of Apollo 11 began on the 16th of July at 13:32 UTC as the Saturn V rocket rose from launch pad 39A at Cape Kennedy. After spending an orbit checking out their spacecraft Apollo 11 reignited the engine on their S-IVB stage at 16:22:13 UTC in order to break free of Earth’s gravity and send the three crewmen on their way to the Moon.

The launch of Apollo 11 (Credit: NASA)

Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit three days later on the 19th at 17:21:50 UTC and Armstrong and Aldren began preparing the LM for the last, historic leg of their journey. The LM began its descent at 17:44 UTC on the 20th.

The Apollo 11 Lunar Module prepares to descend to the Moon’s Surface (Credit: NASA)

Much has been said about the last few seconds of that descent. It wasn’t until several days later that the general public learned that the LM’s autopilot was sending the craft straight into a large crater filled with dangerous boulders. With the total lack of nerves for which he was known even among his fellow astronauts, Armstrong took manual control and flew the LM several kilometers farther, finally finding a suitable landing area with only about 25 seconds of fuel remaining in the craft.

Human beings landed on the Moon for the first time on 20 July 1969 at 20:17:40 UTC. At 02:51 on the 21st, Armstrong squeezed out of the LM’s landing hatch and began climbing down the nine rung ladder. Stopping long enough to pull a D-ring that opened an equipment storage panel Armstrong activated a black and white TV camera that sent the momentous images back to Earth for all humanity to watch.

Neil Armstrong takes the first step on the Moon (Credit: NASA)

As he stepped off the LM’s landing pad and made the very first footprint on the Moon Armstrong said the words that have now become history. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for Mankind.” Much has been said over the last 50 years about the missing “a” in the first phrase. Did Armstrong forget himself for an instant and not say it, did a radio glitch cause it to get lost. It doesn’t matter the sentiment is exactly right.

Armstrong was soon joined by Aldrin on the Lunar surface and for a little over two hours the astronauts gathered about 45 kg of Lunar rocks and soil for analysis back on Earth. They also deployed a number of science experiments that included a seismograph and a Laser reflector. The astronauts returned to the cabin of the LM and closed the hatch at 05:01 UTC.

After a sleep period of seven hours, mission control in Houston woke the astronauts and they prepared for their liftoff for the Moon’s surface. Liftoff took place at 17:54 UTC. In all the astronauts spent 21.5 hours on the Lunar surface.

Returning to orbit around the Moon the LM rendezvoused with the CMS at 21:24 UTC. The Moon walkers spent the next two hours transferring all of their samples along with the film that they had taken before jettisoning the LM module. The LM would later be remotely directed to crash back onto the Moon’s surface so that the seismograph the astronauts had left behind could detect the vibrations. Analyzing those vibrations would tell geologists a great deal about the structure of the Moon’s interior.

Buzz Aldrin stands next to the Seismograph left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 astronauts. (Credit: NASA)

With the entire Apollo 11 crew now reunited in the CSM the preparations began for the engine burn that would return the astronauts to Earth. After leaving Lunar orbit the three-day journey back to Earth passed uneventfully. The Apollo 11 Command module, with the three astronauts and their cargo of the first ever samples of a extraterrestrial body splashed down in the Pacific Ocean 2,660 kilometers to the east of Wake Island at 16:51 UTC on the 24th of July. The total mission duration was 8 days, 3 hours and 19 minutes but in another sense the journey of Apollo 11 had really begun when the first human gazed at the Moon and wondered.

So mankind’s greatest journey came to an end, ten more American astronauts would later walk on the Lunar surface in the next two and a half years but of course it is Apollo 11 that is the best remembered. Eugene Cernan would be the last man to walk on the Moon in December 1972. At the time no one would have imagined that after the triumph of Apollo that 47 years would pass without another human being going any further than Low Earth Orbit (LOE).

So what happened to the spirit of Apollo? What happened to man’s insatiable curiosity? Why haven’t we gone on, beyond Apollo, beyond the Moon?

 In some sense we have. Since Apollo we’ve sent robotic probes to every planet along with moons, comets and asteroids. Robotic probes are both far cheaper and less risky since there’s no need to keep fragile human beings alive so to a large extent robots have taken over the role of explorer from human beings.

The Unmanned Cassini spacecraft spent years studying the planet Saturn and its Moons (Credit: NASA)
The Voyager space probes have even left the Solar System (Credit: NASA)

There’s also been a lot of political turmoil, the Soviet Union of course actually collapsed in the 1990’s. Meanwhile here in the United States it has seemed as if every new President that gets elected has a new goal for NASA to pursue, with the result that NASA gets nowhere.

Whatever the cause of this 40 year pause in manned space exploration it does seem to be coming to a close. NASA is nearing completion of the Orion manned Capsule and the Space Launch System for exploring beyond LOE. Meanwhile China is slowly but slowly but surely progressing with their space program and, perhaps most importantly commercial companies like Space X and Boeing are about to send people into space.

The Space race is once again picking up its pace, and this time a return to the Moon or a voyage to Mars will not be a one shot deal just to demonstrate we can do it. Next time it will be the beginning of a permanent human presence, the beginning of the human colonization of outer space.

The Apollo 11 Landing site as photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2011 (Credit: NASA)

And I promise that I’ll keep you informed of all of the developments here on ‘Science and Science fiction’.

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.

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?

 

 

Space News for May 2019: Are we on our way back to the Moon?

Hopefully it’s not just because the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar landing is coming up in a few months but I’m certain that you’ve noticed there’s been a lot of talk about humans returning to the Moon recently. With that in mind I think I’ll use this month’s installment of Space news to offer my two cents worth.

Back in March NASA was officially tasked by the Trump administration with developing a plan for returning American astronauts to the Lunar surface by the year 2024, hardly enough time to prepare a robotic mission let alone a manned one. That detailed plan has now been released and the new Lunar program has a name at least, Artemis the Greek Goddess of the Moon and the twin sister of Apollo.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announces the Artemis program to take America back to the Moon (Credit: Daily Mail)

Now to be honest, this time NASA doesn’t have to start from scratch as they did back in the 1960s. With the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion crew vehicle the space agency has two of the three major components of an updated Apollo program almost ready to fly. Almost ready, as in both programs have encountered significant delays already and are several years behind schedule.

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) is nearlt ready for its first test launch (Credit: NASA)

NASA’s Orion Crew vehicle is also nearly ready for its first test (Credit: Wikipedia)

Still, the SLS and Orion are expected to undertake their first missions in 2020 so really all NASA needs to put astronauts back on the Moon is a new version of the Lunar Module (LM). You would think that if they concentrate their efforts on producing a LM five years should be enough time to develop one. In fact Lockheed Martin has already prepared some initial designs for just such a Lunar lander so there would be no need to start from scratch.

Lockheed Martin’s concept for a Lunar Lander (Credit: Space News)

Problem is that NASA also wants to construct a space station in Lunar orbit called the Deep Space Gateway and building that could require several times the effort needed for just a new LM. The idea is for the Gateway to serve as a place to park a reusable LM module as well as conduct long-duration missions in deep space. See my post of 31Dec2018.

NASA’s proposed Deep Space Gateway, with an Orion Capsule docked on the left (Credit: Wikipedia)

The complete Artemis program proposed by NASA is both boldly ambitious in scope and detailed in its planning. In addition to meeting Trump’s goal of a manned landing by 2024 the plan continues beyond that with one manned landing each year and concludes in 2028 with the establishment of a semi-permanent Lunar base. The total plan requires 37 launches in all, a mixture of SLS and Commercial Launch Vehicles (CLVs) like the Space X Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy. Most of the missions will not in fact be manned but rather robotic spacecraft that will place equipment in either Lunar orbit or on the Moon’s surface.

The only thing missing now is of course the MONEY! While the full Artemis program should not cost as much as the Apollo program did, adjusting for inflation, it’s still going to require a major increase in NASA’s budget. All at a time when the Federal Government has virtually ground to a halt due to partisan bickering, a time when the yearly federal deficit is over a trillion dollars, and next year is an election year!

Recent and projected yearly Federal budget deficits (Credit: FactCheck.org)

In order to get the ball-rolling Trump has promised to add another $1.6 Billion to NASA’s 2020 budget. That could pay for perhaps one of the 37 missions but hold on, he needs congressional approval even for that small increase.

A better sign of progress was NASA’s awarding of a contract to begin construction of the first of the Gateway modules to Maxar corporation. The $375 million dollar contract is for the design and development of the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE), obviously a critical section of the planned space station.

The first section of the Deep Space Gateway to be constructed will be the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) (Credit: Daily Mail)

Still I have to admit that I don’t hold much hope for Artemis. In terms of an outline for an engineering project it’s first rate but there simply isn’t the political will in this country to get it done. We’ve been down this road before; George H. W. Bush directed NASA to go to Mars but never funded it. George W. Bush wanted to go back to the Moon but never funded it. Bill Clinton just wanted to build a Space Station but at least that got built.

Large-scale scientific project like manned exploration beyond Earth orbit require a long-term commitment by the politicians holding the purse strings. With our present political mess I see little hope of the kind of commitment needed any time soon!

What I’m most afraid of is that a year or so from now, when the hoopla and nostalgia of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 is past the current plans for a return to the Moon will all be forgotten and nothing will have been accomplished.

The Space Race part 6: The Saturn V rocket and Apollo 8

This is the sixth 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 design and development of the Saturn V launch vehicle, still the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. I will also talk about the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned mission to launch on the Saturn V and the first time astronauts left Earth orbit and traveled to another heavenly body, orbiting the Moon ten times before returning safely our planet.

The official NASA patch for the Apollo 8 Mission (Credit: NASA)

If anyone was going to get to the Moon by President Kennedy’s deadline they were going to need a big rocket, much bigger than anything that had ever been built before. Fortunately for NASA Werner von Braun, the German rocket expert that they had rescued at the end of World War II, had been thinking about a manned mission to the Moon since before Hitler’s rise to power. The image below shows von Braun with his circa 1955 concept of a Moon Rocket from a “Tommorowland” episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney”.

Werner von Braun with a model of his proposed Moon Rocket in 1955 (Credit: Disney)

In late 1962 NASA settled that the mission profile for their Lunar program would be Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) wherein two spacecraft would enter lunar orbit, a mothership along with a smaller landing module that would carry two men to the Moon’s surface. Once the lander had returned the astronauts to lunar orbit it would dock with the mothership which would then bring the entire crew back to Earth.

NASA Engineer John Houbolt explains his Lunar Orbit Rendezvous concept of landing on the Moon (Credit: Universe Today)

With that profile settled von Braun could begin the design of the massive rocket that would be needed. Originally designated as the C-5 the Saturn V would dwarf all previous rockets consisting of three stages and standing more than 110m tall with the Apollo spacecraft on top.

A Complete Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft being rolled out to the launch pad (Credit: NASA)

Everything about the Saturn V was enormous; the thrust provided by its first stage was 33 million Newtons provided by five F-1 rocket engines for a total time of 168 seconds. The second stage’s thrust was lower at only 5 million Newtons but it burned for more than twice as long at 384 seconds.

The first stage of the Saturn V used five massive F-1 engines (Credit: Flickr)

The third S-IVB stage would fire twice, firing for a short time to nudge Apollo into Earth orbit while it’s second firing would propel the Apollo Command, Service and Lunar Modules to the Moon. In total the Saturn V was capable of lifting 140,000 kg into Low Earth Orbit (LOE) or 48,600 kg to an Earth Escape trajectory.

In late 1968 the Apollo Command and Service Modules (CSM) had already accomplished their first test mission in Earth orbit during the Apollo 7 mission and the Saturn V had completed its first unmanned launch on November 9th 1967. NASA’s schedule now called for a mission to test the Lunar Module (LM) in Earth orbit but the LM was behind schedule; it wouldn’t be ready until early in 1969. With only a year to go to meet Kennedy’s deadline the space agency had to make some progress.

It was NASA’s Apollo spacecraft manager George Low who suggested that Apollo 8 be assigned the mission of humanity’s first trip around the Moon. Such a mission Low argued, would provide a complete checkout of the full capabilities of the Apollo spacecraft and the Saturn V while at the same time testing NASA’s ability to track and communicate with Apollo all the way to the Moon and back. The fact that the CIA had information that the Soviets were preparing for just such a mission played no small role in the decision.

So it was that on December 21st of 1968 the Apollo 8 mission was launched from Cape Kennedy space center with a crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. The Saturn V rocket performed flawlessly placing the CSM, along with the S-IVB third stage into LOE. This combination of modules represented the first time that a manned spacecraft had been placed into space which was capable of leaving Earth’s gravitational field and journeying into deep space.

The Crew of Apollo 8, Frank Borman (l), Jim Lovell (r) and Bill Anders (c) (Credit: NASA)

After spending two orbits checking out their spacecraft the Apollo 8 crew was given the command from mission control “Apollo 8, you are go for TLI” where TLI stood for Trans Lunar Insertion. The engine of the S-IVB stage was reignited and the crew of Apollo 8 became the first human beings to reach Earth escape velocity, they were on their way to the Moon.

During the sixty-eight hour journey to the Moon the CSM detached from the S-IVB stage, turned 180º about and ‘practiced’ removing a LM from its storage position place in the S-IVB. On the 24th of December, Christmas Eve, the spacecraft passed behind the Moon and the Apollo 8 crew became the first human beings to see the far side of the Moon with their own eyes.

Firing the Service Module engine while speeding over farside the Apollo spacecraft entered Lunar orbit, completing ten orbits in about twenty hours. With the Moon between them and Earth the Apollo 8 crew were completely out of radio contact, further from Earth than any human beings had ever been. As the CSM came out from behind the Moon the crew became the first humans to ever witness an Earthrise, see image below.

Earthrise as seen for the first time by the crew of Apollo 8 (Credit: NASA)

It was while orbiting the Moon on Christmas Eve that the Apollo 8 crew sent back to Earth a live television transmission that famously included a reading by the crew of the first chapter of the book of Genesis as translated in the King James Bible.

The riskiest stages of the mission were still to come. Would the Service Module’s engine fire again to speed Apollo 8 back to Earth and would the heat shied on the Command Module protect the crew as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere at the speed of 40,000 kph, over 11 kps!

This Apollo 8 reentry photograph was taken by a U.S. Air Force ALOTS (Airborne Lightweight Optical Tracking System) camera mounted on a KC-135A aircraft flown at 40,000 ft altitude. (Credit: NASA / USAF)

The Apollo 8 crew and equipment performed flawlessly and the crew splashed down on December 27th 1968. Human beings had now journeyed to the Moon; all that remained was to land safely and return. Apollo 8 splashed down safely in the north Pacific Ocean on 27 December of 1968.

The Apollo 8 capsule bobbing in the Pacific Ocean on 27 December 1968. (Credit: NASA)

It’s Horseshoe Crab mating season in the Delaware Bay, a ritual of the natural World that’s nearly half a billion years old.

One of the most ancient forms of life on Earth are the Horseshoe Crabs, a family of arthropods that are actually more closely related to modern spiders and scorpions than real crabs. Horseshoe crabs have been living in the oceans of the world for more than 450 million years now, so long that they are commonly referred to as ‘living fossils’.

The Fossil of a Horseshoe Crab is from the Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago and looks hardly different from those alive today (Credit: House and Home Magazine)

As befits their name Horseshoe Crabs have a hard external shell, the large front piece of which has a rough ‘horseshoe’ shape. Unlike the true crabs whose legs and claws come out of the sides of their shells however the legs of Horseshoe Crabs are underneath and completely covered by that hard shell.

The external anatomy of the Horseshoe Crab, top and bottom (Credit: University of Southern Florida)

Horseshoe Crabs are fairly common creatures; there are four species spread across the world. Here on the U.S. east coast the local species is known as Limulus polyphemus and they live in the shallow waters of the bays and inlets feeding off of small pieces of food, worms, small mollusks and whatever else they can find to eat in the sand.

The best time to observe Horseshoe Crabs is during their spring breeding season when they come ashore to mate and lay their eggs on sandy beaches. For me that means a trip down to the lower Delaware bay during late May or early June.

Horseshoe Crabs Mating. The larger female is up front with the smaller male behind (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

Now you have to find the right beach, too many people will disturb the crabs and the sandier the beach is the more crabs will come to mate on it. If you find the right beach at the right time however you get to watch as literally thousands of these ancient creatures come out of the water to create another generation of their kind.

Mating for Horseshoe Crabs is a pretty simple affair. The larger females come ashore and deposit their eggs into the sand. The smaller males grab the female from behind and fertilize the eggs as the female lays them. Competition amongst the males is fierce and it is not uncommon to find two or three males all trying to grab and mate with the same female.

For the best show you also have to come at the right time. The crabs come ashore at high tide but of course that’s when the beach is covered by water so they’re not easy to see. The best time to arrive is about an hour or two after high tide and then watch as the receding water reveals them by their thousands. I timed it perfectly this year as there were some Horseshoe Crabs already on the beach as we arrived but as the tide receded it seemed as if with every minute that passed more and more of the creatures appeared out of the water.

The outgoing tide reveals thousands of Horseshoe Crabs ready to mate (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

The annual mating of the Horseshoe Crabs is an important event for other creatures besides just the crabs. You see the crab’s eggs are very nutritious and represents a vital food source for several species of migrating shorebirds, especially the Red Knots.

Red Knots are a migratory bird with one of the longest yearly journeys of any living creature. During winter in the northern hemisphere the Red Knots live at the bottom of South America but they breed in the northern parts of Canada during the northern summer, a round trip of over 30,000 kilometers.

The Red Knot shorebird, center, has one of the longest migration journeys of any living creature (Credit: E. M. Lawler)

As you might guess the Red Knots need to find some good meals along the way. In fact the Horseshoe Crab eggs are so important to the birds that they time their migration so as to arrive along the U. S. east coast just as the Crabs are breeding. This interrelationship between two such different species is one of the more interesting stories that illustrate the complexity of life here on Earth.

Today both species, crab and bird are threatened by human activity. For a long time Horseshoe Crabs were cut up and used for bait in order to trap eels but they are also harvested for their blood that is used to detect bacterial infections by the pharmaceutical industry. (By the way, the blood of Horseshoe Crabs is based on copper rather than iron as ours is so it is blue in colour.) The biggest threat to Horseshoe Crabs however is the loss of breeding territory because of shoreline development.

The shell of this Horseshoe Crab has become the home of several barnacles. You can also see how the animal has been tagged to aid scientists in their studies of the creature (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

 

Watching the Horseshoe Crabs as they came ashore to lay their eggs I knew that I was witnessing one of the oldest annual events in the history of life here on Earth. As the shorebirds walked between the crabs feeding on the freshly laid eggs I began to wonder what creatures might have eaten those eggs say 350 million years ago. That would have been the time of the earliest amphibians, the ancestors of all modern vertebrates, reptiles, birds and mammals. Is it possible that the mating of Horseshoe Crabs might have provided food for our own distant forebears?

Horseshoe crabs are very ancient creatures after all, for all of our science we probably only know a fraction of all the things that they’ve seen.

Paleontology News for May 2019: Two new interesting species of dinosaurs discovered.

Most people know that the dinosaurs dominated Earth for over 150 million years but of course it wasn’t just one species of dinosaur and not all of the dinosaurs were so dominating. Some species were smaller, more inconspicuous relatives of the better-known giants while others represented evolutionary experiments that, for one reason or another simply did not leave any descendents, in other words they were experiments that failed.

I’ll start with the recent discovery of a relative of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex discovered in New Mexico by Dr. Sterling Nesbitt of Virginia Tech College of Science’s Department of Geosciences. Named Suskityrannus hazelae the two-legged theropod likely measured about 2.7 m from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail and stood less than a meter tall at the hip. This small meat eating would have weighted between 20 and 40 kg and likely hunted smaller animals.

An Artist’s illustration of Suskityrannus hazelae (Credit: Andrey Atuchin)

According to Dr. Nesbitt, “Suskityrannus hazelae gives us a glimpse into the evolution of tyrannosaurs just before they take over the planet.” Based on the geologic strata in which it was discovered S hazelae lived some 92 million years ago near the beginning of the Cretaceous period. Because of the time it lived along with its anatomy S hazelae could prove to be a link between the older and smaller tyrannosauroids of North America and China and the much larger tyrannosaurids of which T rex is the best-known member.

Dr. Sterling Nesbitt with the bones of S hazelae (Credit: Virginia Tech)

The second new species of dinosaur to be discovered is rather a bit stranger. Ambopteryx longibrachium is a species of theropod dinosaur that flew, or perhaps only glided, with leathery bat like wings. Now I’m not talking about one of the pterosaurs, those bat like reptiles that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs but which weren’t dinosaurs.

The flying reptiles known as Pterosaurs were not dinosaurs! Their anatomy is different! (Credit: Iraber.info)

A longibrachium is a theropod, the same group of dinosaurs that includes T-rex and from which the true flying dinosaurs, better known as birds, would come. In fact A longibrachium lived approximately at the same time as the first birds, the late Jurassic period some 163 million years ago, about the same time as the famous Archaeopteryx.

Artist’s illustration of what Ambopteryx Longibrachium may have looked like (Credit: Smithsonian)

The fossils of A longibrachium are remarkably well preserved not only showing the membrane of their leathery wings but also the impressions of fuzzy feathers that were probably helped to keep the animal warm. The most critical part of the anatomy to be preserved was an enlarged, rod like wrist bone known as a styliform, an adaptation previously unknown in dinosaurs but present in pterosaurs and flying squirrels.

The actual fossil of A longibrachium. The leathery wings are quite obvious (Credit: Discovery Magazine)

The fossil remains of A longibrachium were discovered in China by scientists at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Over the last few decades there has been a lot of paleontological research underway in China with important discoveries being made in many different periods of Earth’s history. (See my post of 10 April 2019)

Ambopteryx longibrachium fits into the evolutionary tree of small theropods very closely to those who would become the birds! (Credit: Nature)

So what happened to the dinosaurs like A longibrachium? Well perhaps the bat winged dinosaurs lost out to their relatives the evolving true birds. Or perhaps there was some ecological crisis that the bat winged dinosaurs failed to survive. We can’t say at present, but you can be certain that the paleontologists will keep searching for the answers, and isn’t that what science is all about!