A new archeological discovery might be from the day of the big asteroid strike that took down the dinosaurs, bird goo is helping us understand airplane accidents, and find out about the most human-like robot finger you’ve ever seen!
A new archeological discovery might be from the day of the big asteroid strike that took down the dinosaurs, bird goo is helping us understand airplane accidents, and find out about the most human-like robot finger you’ve ever seen!
Glass Rain Dinosaur Pain
Snarge Science
Human Skin Cyborg
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/glass-rain-dinosaur-pain-snarge-science-human-skin-cyborg
[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today, you’ll learn about a new archeological discovery that might be from the day of the big asteroid strike, how bird goo is helping us understand airplane accidents, and the most human-like robot finger you’ve ever seen!
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Calli, I have an incredible dinosaur story today to share. Researchers in North Dakota claim to have found fossils from creatures killed on the very day a giant asteroid struck Earth. The remarkable find of immaculately preserved fossils includes a dinosaur leg complete with well preserved skin, fish fossils, and even the embryo of the impressive flying pterosaur preserved within an egg.
CALLI: Preserved bone and skin? That is too cool. But how can we pinpoint the DAY these creatures died MILLIONS of years ago?
NATE: That's a great question, and to best answer it, it really helps to understand the asteroid strike and its effect on our planet and life 66 million years ago. It is known as the Chicxulub impact.
CALLI: Well I know it happened near the Gulf of Mexico, and I know it was not good for a lot of dinosaurs.
NATE: The asteroid, at least six miles wide, struck Earth and created a crater over 100 miles wide and 18 miles deep. The impact was so big it threw 25 trillion metric tons of debris into the air.
CALLI: 25 trillion? That's an unbelievable amount.
NATE: Think of how a pebble hitting the surface of the water creates a splash, and then ripples, it would have been like that but with earthen debris. Advanced modeling showed that this “splash” of earth would have thrown debris up higher than Mount Everest, more than 28,000 feet up! A jet of molten earth would have shot up and exited the atmosphere before falling across North America. The impact would have released as much energy as more than a billion atomic bombs.
CALLI: Oh that is definitely terrifying.
NATE: It is. The resulting die-off is known as the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction.
CALLI: And researchers think they found fossils from the exact day the debris rained down?
NATE: Yes. The researchers claim that the jumble of perfectly preserved creatures at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota died on the day of impact. And part of their evidence is actual pieces of the asteroid that caused the extinction itself!
CALLI: North Dakota is pretty far from the Gulf of Mexico, it's incredible that the debris traveled so far.
NATE: It’s kind of a good thing it did. The debris is actually what led the researchers to thinking these dinosaurs died that day. Inside the gills of the fossilized fish at the site, researchers found ejecta spherules. These are basically spherical, glassy rocks ejected after a major impact. The rock melts, shoots into the sky, and then condenses into droplets as it falls from the sky.
CALLI: So, wait a minute…You’re saying there was…glass rain?
NATE: Yes. And the glassy rocks they found in the gills have been chemically linked to material at the impact location in the Gulf of Mexico. What's more, they analyzed these droplets further and found some extraterrestrial elements.
CALLI: Like parts of the asteroid itself? Wow. But does that really prove they died that day? What if the particles fell for a few days or even weeks?
NATE: Those questions are at the root of a bit of controversy about the find. Many outside researchers believe the spherules in the gills of the fish are a clear sign that these creatures, the fish at least, died from results of the impact, but they’re unwilling to say the other creatures at the site did as well, or that any of them died on the actual day of impact. The team that found the remains argues that the fossilized leg is proof it died on the day of the impact because of its location in the sediment, how the leg appears as if it were quickly ripped off the rest of the dinosaur, and the fact that it showed no signs of having been scavenged or eaten after it separated from the rest of the body.
CALLI: I’m sure more research will put a firmer timeline on these discoveries.
NATE: Well the good news is, whether or not we can ever confirm that these are from the exact day of the asteroid strike, the find is still meaningful. We found pieces of the asteroid, creatures killed by the effects of the impact, and that pterosaur egg we mentioned? Regardless of when it died, it's a fascinating find. Researchers were able to analyze it and determine it had a leathery shell, and they are using x-ray tomography to scan and reconstruct the chick inside to get an idea of what it looked like.
CALLI: That is really cool. I can’t wait to see that!
NATE: Me too!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, do you remember the Miracle on the Hudson? When Captain Sully Sullenberger landed an Airbus A320 passenger plane on the Hudson River?
NATE: Yes, that was amazing!
CALLI: It was! That whole incident happened when the plane struck a group of birds. Bird strikes are actually a real problem in the aviation industry,causing plane damage and in some exceedingly rare cases, crashes that result in human deaths... Researchers who investigate the causes of these strikes, and how to prevent them, rely on a gross, feathery, and slimy substance called…snarge.
NATE: Snarge? I’ve never heard that word before.
CALLI: It's a sort of catch-all phrase for all the bits and smears of birds that remain after planes and birds collide. It's often a messy sludge of feathers, beak, blood, and anything else that works its way into the mix.
NATE: That is so gross. I would not want to see that.
CALLI:...I don’t blame you, but researching it has proved to be crucial for understanding aviation accidents. In 1960, a group of birds caused a deadly accident near Boston. As investigators dug through the crash site, they kept finding globs of black feathery sludge, but they couldn’t tell what kind of birds they were looking at.
NATE: Too bad there wasn’t a sludge expert on staff.
CALLI: There was about to be. They called in an ornithologist to help piece together the clues, Roxie Laybourne, a feather expert from the Smithsonian Institute. Laybourne collected feathers from the site, took them back to her lab, and compared the microscopic patterns in them to the robust collection of feathers at the Smithsonian. Surprisingly, the feathers weren’t from a large bird, but rather a bunch of smaller European Starlings.
NATE: Huh, I would have thought geese or other large birds.
CALLI: Right? This finding greatly changed how we approached airline safety. Laybourne became a sort of air-traffic legend known as the feather lady or the Queen of Snarge. Designers and engineers had to start considering biology alongside aerodynamics and engineering tolerances. In the decades after that first snarge investigation, airports started hiring wildlife biologists to help discourage birds from lingering in plane flight paths.
NATE: So airports changed, but did airplanes?
CALLI: Absolutely. Many models are now built with the ability to withstand high speed impacts with birds up to eight pounds, even still, incidents with birds, like Captain Sully’s, do happen. And recently, they’ve been increasing.
NATE: Does that mean it's getting more dangerous to fly?
CALLI: Flying is still statistically the safest way to travel, bird strikes only account for one human death every 10 billion flying hours. Four main factors have increased the prevalence of strikes. First, our success in wildlife protection means there are more birds…especially migratory birds that fly in flocks. We also have more air traffic, larger, more powerful, jet engines that are more likely to suck birds in, and finally…we are better at identifying bird strikes. Crashes that may have previously occurred for unknown reasons can now be attributed to bird strikes, thanks to snarge science.
NATE: Is the investigative work still the same? Digging through the snarge until you find a few feathers you can put under a microscope?
CALLI: It's definitely still part of the process, but the technology has improved in the decades since that first investigation. Sometimes the snarge is so fine there aren’t any feathers preserved well enough to examine, but thankfully today’s researchers can look at DNA instead.
NATE: As with all things, though, I imagine an ounce of prevention goes a long way, how do we keep birds and planes apart from one another?
CALLI: The Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Lab and Federal Aviation Administration continue to work together with wildlife biologists. Sometimes they capture and relocate birds. Often they scare them off by projecting distress calls, and other times they make the area less appealing by removing standing water, food scraps, and cover areas birds might be likely to perch with nets.
NATE: That's good, let's keep the birds in one piece, snarge free.
CALLI: Absolutely. But should a bird strike happen, the Feather Identification Lab, and a team of snarge researchers, will be ready.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: I’ve got an interesting story today about a team of Japanese researchers who were able to use commercially available experimental human skin cells to create a shockingly lifelike skin-covered robot finger.
CALLI: A skin covered finger? What’s wrong with using something like silicone for a robot?
NATE: Right now, most silicone-skinned robots only look human from a distance. These researchers wanted to create something that could be mistaken for the real thing. They took skin-like material and got it to sort of grow around a robot finger. The finger could move like a human finger, and had seamless skin that looked surprisingly like the real thing.
CALLI: Ok wait but how do you grow skin on something that clearly isn't alive?
NATE: Well first they mixed collagen, a protein that makes our skin stretchy, and human dermal fibroblasts, cells that form our skin's connective tissue and helps it heal. Then they took their robot finger and submerged it in this mixture and put it in an incubator to help the cells grow for three days. The mixture grew and molded to the finger, tightening down on it. They then took the cells that make up the vast majority of the outer layer of our skin, the epidermis, and poured these cells over the finger’s first layer of skin. They let the cells grow for another two weeks, and after that, they had a human-like-skin covered finger.
CALLI: That’s cool, but also kind of creepy. Was it stiff or did it…move.
NATE: The flexible skin could move and bend with the finger. It even felt like human skin.
CALLI: What would happen if I cut it? Is there fake blood too?
NATE: If you cut it….it could heal itself…sort of. Researchers created a collagen band-aid that they could apply to the skin. Eventually, this band-aid was absorbed by the robot skin to heal the cut. It's similar to one of our methods for helping burn victims heal their skin. The robot doesn’t have a vascular system, though, so there wouldn’t be any blood. Because of this, the skin doesn’t get new nutrients, so it's pretty thin and has to be constantly cared for.
CALLI: So if it can’t bleed, what about other features of skin, like sensing pressure or heat?
NATE: Well right now it can’t sense things, but researchers say in the future this might be
possible. We could embed electronic sensors and create a sort of nervous system in these artificial skins.
CALLI: Ok but WHY do we want to do this? I sometimes get uncomfortable about artificial intelligence and creating sentience, an awareness of being “alive,” in robots. I’m not sure I want them to look and feel human too.
NATE: Well one thought is that as our society becomes more automated, we’ll likely be dealing more with robots in our everyday lives. That could be more AI chatbots online, but it could also mean communicating face to face with robots in the service industry, or even as care givers. Dealing with robots makes a lot of people uncomfortable right now, but if we could make them more human, some researchers think we might be able to engineer a sort of empathy for robots, and lessen that unease.
CALLI: But sometimes I feel like when things start looking too human, they get extra extra creepy. Like dolls, I know they’re not human, and the fact that they look kind of human just creeps me out.
NATE: That feeling comes from what's known as the uncanny valley, it's the idea that once things that aren’t human start to seem just a bit too human, our comfort around them plummets, the resemblance is, well, uncanny. It's a big debate in the field of robotics right now because no one really knows where that line is that makes things go from comfortingly human, to creepily human. But once you cross it, it creates a fear response. Some researchers think that response might even come from the parts of our brain that help us understand what being a human even is.
CALLI: Well if they start having skin like ours, that question is only going to get more complicated, AND existential.
NATE: The future is complicated, and we still have a lot of questions to answer, but human-like robots are starting to seem supremely possible, maybe even in the near future.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: Researchers claim to have found the fossilized remains of animals that died on the very day the asteroid that caused the dinosaur’s extinction struck earth. While this find is causing controversy in the paleontological world, the clues in these fossils, and the insights we gain from them, are helping us better understand the end days of some of Earth’s most fearsome creatures.
NATE: Bird strikes are becoming more common in the world of aviation, but a surprising substance is helping us learn why these events happen, and how to prevent them in the future. That substance? Snarge. A sludgy mess of bodily remains left after bird impacts.
CALLI: Japanese researchers have created a robotic finger covered seamlessly in near-human skin. The impressive process will help create more human-like robots, but not all researchers are sure this will be a good thing.