Science Friday - Stephen Hawking, Women In Blockchain, Dinosaurs. March 16, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: March 16, 2018

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking died this week at the age of 76. Hawking challenged and inspired a generation of physicists, and we remember his life and legacy.  Plus, blockchain is the technology that makes possible every transaction made with Bitcoin—or any digital currency, for that matter. And when Bitcoin skyrocketed on the stock market last year, it turned average Joes into millionaires. Why just Joes? Most surveys show that 95 percent of blockchain enthusiasts and crypto investors are male. We discuss the future of women in blockchain. Then, inside the fossilized bones of Archaeopteryx, one of the earliest bird-like dinosaur specimens, researchers have found evidence of a capability for flight.  Finally, what does a Tyrannosaurus rex actually look like? You might immediately think of the iconic, roaring lizard from the Jurassic Park films. But one scientific illustrator turns to paleontology studies and fossil finds—poring over the science to accurately reimagine creatures that no longer exist today. And what he renders might surprise you. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, Science Friday listeners, this is Flora Lickman. I'm sitting in for Ira today, and I wanted to let you know about this podcast I host when I'm not here, called Every Little Thing. On the show, we have a factual helpline open 24-7, and we find experts to answer your questions, like, what would happen to a human body in outer space? Oh, you die, you die. Horribly, disgustingly, unpleasantly. To get the details on that and other burning questions, check out every little thing on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten.

Ira Flato is away. A bit later in the hour, we'll be talking about how women are breaking into the male-dominated world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. But first, this week, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking passed away. Joining me now to talk about that and other science news from the week is Amy Nordrum, news editor at I-Triple-E Spectrum. She's here in our New York studios. Welcome back, Amy. Hi, Flora. Hey, so I feel like most of us know Stephen Hawking's name.

But what was he famous for scientifically? Yeah, Stephen Hawking is a renowned physicist, and he's perhaps best known for his contributions to our understanding of black holes. So black holes are these swirls of mass and energy with a big gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape them. And Hawking's contribution was primarily a show

that these black holes actually do emit some things so they can emit radiation, they can actually emit particles. And this is now termed Hawking radiation among physicists. And it's led to a lot of new questions around black holes and new paths for people to continue to explore in physics. I think I remember, I was reading the obituaries this week, and people called his paper

on exploding black holes, like the most beautiful physics paper ever written. That's right. I actually tried to read it. It was published in nature, and I couldn't understand it, but it's full of equations, and obviously physicists are still thinking a lot about it and continuing to work on the theories that he's put forward. Okay, so if I want to read some Hawking, where should I start? Yeah, Hawking is also a beloved popularizer of science. So in the 1980s, he published a book called A Brief History of Time, and that book has sold more than 10 million copies since his publication. So a lot of

people, you know, look at that book. He attempts to take on a very difficult role for an author, which has explained the history of the universe. But, you know, a lot of people have found it useful and very accessible for his interpretation of it. So Dr. Hawking was on Science Friday. We have a clip from a recording of Dr. Hawking made for Science Friday back in 2013. He suffered from a neurodegenerative illness and he spoke using a speech synthesizer.

And here's what he said when we asked him about the limits of science. I believe there are no questions that science can't answer about the physical universe. Although we don't yet have a full understanding of the laws of nature, I think we will eventually find a complete unified theory. Some people would claim that things like love, joy, and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms. But I think they can all be explained by the theory of evolution. So moving.

Yeah, you know, I think a lot of his greatness comes from his. his ability to kind of combine and blend different areas of science and different theories. So his work on black holes was combining, you know, Einstein's theory of relativity and what it says about how massive objects produce a gravitational force with quantum mechanics, which is really concerned with the tiniest particles that we know of. And so his ability to kind of bridge these fields, and like you said, try to come up with a theory of everything is a really powerful concept. And he wasn't able to ever formulate that himself, but obviously work will continue on that.

And it's a really grand idea to think about. He will certainly be missed. In other news this week, you have a story, this is really tantalizing, I think, about rogue satellites. That's right. You know, a lot of, there's a lot of action in the private space world right now. There's all kinds of startups that are throwing up satellites for lots of different reasons and purposes, new business models being formed around these lower cost, cheaper satellite launches. And there's one company in particular that one of our contributors, Mark Harris, took a look at. So this company is called Swarm Technologies, and they're based in Silicon Valley.

And they had this innovative kind of experimental satellite concept. So these satellites that they proposed to launch for about a fourth the size of the smallest satellites that are going up into orbit today. How big are they? They're about the size of a hard back book, who could say. Smaller than a bread box. Smaller than a QSAT, which is what the breadbox size satellites are that you always hear about. So they're going to launch these tinier satellites up into space, and they're going to use them to form this communications network. So they have this idea that we're going to need more and more things connected.

down here on Earth, and companies will pay to track devices that are being attached to trucks and other goods as they move around the world. Is this like Internet of Things? Yeah, exactly. So they would be supplying the kind of backhaul, the data transmission capabilities that these tiny little IOT devices would be sending up to space. So Swarm had this big idea, and they applied for an FCC license to launch these tiny satellites. And the FCC actually denied their license last year because they were worried that satellites

were too small. they'd be tough to track and they'd be tough for other spacecraft and satellites to detect and stay out of the way of. So it appears now, based on Mark Harris's work, that the company has gone forward and launched these satellites anyway. So Swarm appears to have launched the satellites in January on a rocket that was launched by the Indian Space Agency. And the FCC is not too happy about this, as you can imagine.

So what is the recourse for the FCC, though? Like, they're there, right? Well, they're up there. Yeah, they're in orbit. so far as we can tell, on about the same path that Swarm had originally proposed sending them on. And the FCC's response has been to issue a very strongly worded letter, that Swarm had applied for another license to launch some more rockets, or some more satellites on a rocket this April. And so now the FCC is taking a look again at that application they'd already granted and possibly going to revoke it. Does the FCC, I can't understand the jurisdiction, though, because the FCC, they obviously don't regulate what.

goes on into an Indian rocket, for example, right? Yeah, I mean, the SEC has authority over these U.S. startups, and it wasn't unauthorized launch. They were concerned about the safety of it. And there's at least three federal agencies, the FCC, the FAA, and then the NOAA, that have some jurisdiction over space launches and making sure that space is safe for everyone, these satellite launches go well. But it's tricky because, obviously, there are more and more opportunities to launch

all around the world for these startups to take advantage. advantage of, and Swarm may have found a loophole in this process. This feels like a classic ask forgiveness, not permission. That may be what's happening here, and Swarm has not said anything about it, and at FCC so far hasn't commented beyond what we are able to read in their letter. So we're going to be watching this story and seeing how it plays out. Interesting. Okay, closer to home, there was a story this week about a snow melting blanket.

Tell me more. Yeah, this researcher, Virginia Tech, who's driving around campus one day, and it had snow. recently, and he was late to a meeting, and so he was kind of panicking trying to find a parking spot. And the parking lot he was in, he realizes like a third of the spaces were full of snow and these massive snow banks that the plows had created when they had tried to clear the parking lot. I'm familiar with this as a New Yorker?

Yeah, this is a chronic problem. A lot of people in northern climates can relate to. So he started thinking about it, and he realized this is like a problem that we create for ourselves because we're the ones that pile up snow into these big banks, and snow is highly reflective, and so it's tough for the middle of those snow banks to melt away, and then they last for a really long time. This is bothering him so much that he's come up with this solution to it, like many great scientists do, and he's conceived of this thermal blanket, and he says, if we had a thermal blanket that we could throw over these snow banks and help the snow melt

faster, that would be super useful. And so far, he's made it as far as to do a lab experiment in which he's just spray-painted aluminum foil black, and then put that over some snow that he made with like a snow cone maker. But this is how things start, right? So the snow blanket or the thermal blanket, which is really a piece of aluminum foil, he tested it in the lab and it effectively melted snow three times faster than if the snow had just been left on its own. So you put this blanket over a snowbank.

It's black, so it absorbs heat from the sun. Exactly. And then it transfers it to the snow and melts it. That's why it's important that it's metal, too, so it can conduct the heat from the outer surface to the inner surface. And so, yeah, that's his idea. and he's hoping, you know, that it worked in the lab three times faster. So he's thinking that maybe this could be a commercial product someday.

Or slash a DIY project. Yeah, I mean, you could try this at home. Absolutely. It's something that, you know, low material costs, so low investment. And he thinks there could be some environmental and cost savings here. I mean, cities pay tons of money to have snow removal every year and use a lot of salt and chemicals to get rid of it, too. So this could be a better way.

All right. Next up, I want you to listen to this. Amy, what are we listening to? Those are Ravens. and they are doing what's known as food calls. So this is a call that they would do when they're around some food that they can't get to, basically. They want to get to the food, but there's a problem.

The problem could be a predator, or it could be that there's another territorial pair of ravens that are kind of defending it. It's like a hangary call. Yeah, you could definitely characterize it as a hangary call. And so the ravens are basically asking for help. I mean, they're putting these calls out trying to get reinforcements, trying to get other ravens to join them.

And some new research out this week showed that the raven call, it contains more than just information. It's not just communicating that they see food and they want to go get it. It also contains particular characteristics to each individual. So it's possible to distinguish the age of the raven and the sex of the raven based on these calls. And that's not unlike humans where you can maybe guess whether someone's young or old based on the frequency and amplitude of their voice. So now we know that the same thing happens in ravens. That makes sense. Okay, we have time for one more, I think.

And this is like the most fun application of graphene that I've heard about. So remind us what graphing is. Yeah, graphing is a material that has an almost comical reputation for being applied for all kinds of solutions and ideas within electronics mainly, but also other fields. It's a single layer of carbon atoms. And it's very strong. It's highly conductive. It has a lot of cool properties. It's the thinnest material we've ever been able to find.

And this is a very peculiar idea for how to use graphene. And there's some researchers at Northwestern University who have proposed a way to dye hair with grapene, which I'd never heard it before. So it wraps around the individual hairs. Do I have that right? Yeah, it's kind of cool when you think about it because a lot of hair dyes, they actually pull up the cuticle or outer covering of the hair strand. And there's a chemical combination that occurs within the hair to dye the strand. And this one more just like wraps around the outside. So it's more of like a coating. And they did test it, I guess the minimum number of washes you need to get a hair dye to be considered permanent.

is 30, and this lasts longer than 30 washes. So it dyes your hair deep black, by the way. And they're also able to get shades of brown, too. But that's it. Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't go blonde with graphene, I don't think. I have this vision of the lab of just, like, tons of wigs or, like, mice with interesting new hair colors. Yeah, I mean, they did some cool, like, frizz tests, too, in terms of static electricity

because graphene is so conductive. The idea is that actually putting this hair dye in your hair. hair can remove static electricity because it helps it get rid of, you know, built up charges more easily. It's a frizzies as well? Yeah, defrize. Can I buy it? Not yet.

It's definitely still in the lab stages. Maybe someday. Thank you, Amy. Thanks. Amy Nordrum is the news editor at I-Triple-E Spectrum. When we come back, why we need more women joining the blockchain movement. Stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I'm Flora Lichten. At South by Southwest, a tech conference in Austin, this week, one word was on everybody's lips, blockchain. It's the technology that makes every transaction made with Bitcoin or any digital currency possible, and when Bitcoin's value surged last year, it turned average Joe's into millionaires. And yes, specifically Joe's, because most surveys show that roughly 95% of blockchain enthusiasts and crypto investors are men. Joining me now to talk about that and why it matters are my guests. Nellie Bowles is a reporter covering tech and internet culture for the New York Times.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me. Carrie Flynn reports on the Business of Technology for Mashable. Welcome to SciFri. Hi, thank you. Veronica Reynolds, co-founder of the UCLA Blockchain Lab. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me.

And are you a woman working in blockchain? Please give us a call. We want to hear from you. Our number is 844-724-8255. that's 844 SciTalk or tweet us at SciFri. Okay, Nellie, I know this is risky because we're on live radio right now. I'm nervous already. Don't be.

Blockchain is notoriously difficult to explain and understand, I think. I don't think I'm... So do you have a simple... People always have like a new metaphor for how to explain blockchain. They'll be like, okay, it's like an ATM. and then there's a camel. And blockchain is a publicly verifiable digital ledger. It's kind of a quick, jargony way to explain it.

It's a platform. It will be used for many different things. How the blockchain is used in our lives and what it means is really yet to be seen. And that's what's so exciting about right now and about covering it right now. Veronica, you work in blockchain. Does that sound right to you? Is there anything you'd add? No, I think that's a pretty good description.

I always describe it as a decentralized ledger where people from around the world can contribute their transactions in a public, transparent way. So the ledger exists in multiple places, so that provides some added security. Do I have that right? Yeah, I mean, you can say it exists in multiple places.

It technically does, right? So computers serve as nodes, and so the ledger is actually sitting on these computers around the world. But in another sense, it's existing kind of everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Great. Gary, you were at South by Southwest this week.

So blockchain isn't just about cryptocurrencies, right? Like, what are the other ways that people are using it? Yeah, the cryptocurrency part is definitely a really loud and really understandable use case of it. But I spoke with a lot of people there who see it being far greater. Just like the internet isn't just for reading about news stories. I think one that's been most fascinating is that, the benefits for food supply. So, for instance, a restaurant being able to really understand whether or not the food that they get from a farm is actually directly from the farm,

being able to track where your food is being sourced and where it's coming from. And then because it's publicly available, it's not just the supplier and the distributor, but also people like you and me being able to verify that it's true. Cool. So Nellie, you wrote an article about blockchain bros. Did you coin the term? The people I interviewed coined the term, but I did, yes. So walk me through the type specimen of a blockchain bro. The type specimen. So I've been in, I'm based in San Francisco and I've been covering the blockchain boom that we've seen over the last year and the sort of culture of it. And one aspect of the culture of it is that there are major gender problems.

It is a predominantly male space, and a lot of women were involved early on and have felt like they are being pushed out now as the sort of price of cryptocurrencies has gone up, and there's been a frenzy, and the quote-unquote blockchain bros have come into the space. The blockchain bro being someone who maybe doesn't have extreme technical knowledge, but maybe bought Bitcoin or Ether early on, was on Reddit, was on 4chan, was sort of active involved in this community, but is sort of like in it for cash. Yeah, where was the bro born? Are these like the blockchain bro, let me be specific.

Where was the blockchain bro born? I mean, are these like finance people or? It's a mix. I mean, it's a community. It's an industry that's exploding. There's not one type of person. You will find really serious. really philosophical nerds who just want to see a revolution take over.

And you will find people who are in it for get rich quick schemes, who want to run scams, and you will find all kinds of people in the space. The gender situation is very problematic, though. And that is something that you hear time and again and problematic in serious ways. I mean, conferences with 85 to 1 speaker skews, you know, I mean, just astonishing numbers. And you go to these meetups, and often you don't run into a lot of women. Veronica, is that your experience? Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

So I actually worked in music and tech prior to this. I was a little bit used to kind of the gender disparity in both of those industries. And I started going to a lot of events in the middle of last year. And at the first big conference I went to, it kind of came in after lunch. And I looked around and I felt uncomfortable and I asked myself, gosh, why are, you know, why are you feeling uncomfortable right now? And then it dawned on me. It's because I don't see myself mirrored.

Like I looked around and it was a sea of men. And so what I started doing at that conference and basically every event I've been too since is just walking up to the other women kind of commenting on the gender disparity and saying, can we connect? Can we do something? And so what's happened as a result of that

is I've joined a bunch of Slack, Telegram, Facebook, and WhatsApp channels that are just groups of women who are connected around blockchain and it spans women from finance, engineers, you know, policy, et cetera, all just kind of gathering. And you've seen this real, I think, this year especially in the early part of 2018, just a lot of events emerging that are focused. And most of them are women driven around women in blockchain and kind of highlighting, not the fact that we're women, the fact that we're doing things in the space.

What are the stakes of women being left out of this? The stakes are huge. I mean, I have covered the last startup boom, and now this, which is really looking to be like another industry-wide boom in the same way that the Internet was and the mobile web was. The early winners in these spaces set the tone and start a cascade of effects that last for the entire generation of the space. They become the investors. They become the social community leader. it matters a lot. And I think a lot of people are feeling like they don't want history to repeat itself. They don't want the same thing that we saw with the last startup boom to happen again. Yeah, and I think there's a big idea because we're not seeing many women in the space right now.

Sure, like we just spoke about, there are women groups and that's awesome. But if women aren't put in the spotlight, that's where you have an issue of future people, people who are not in the community already, but are maybe thinking about it, feeling like we talked about not welcomed, and that's exactly what we experienced in the tech. And then when finally women start to join, then they feel like they need to leave and they don't stay on. And I would be scared of a future there. Tell me about Portopia. Portopia. So that's a little bit, it's related to the sort of gender stuff, but it's kind of a separate story. Portopia is a utopian effort that's happening in Puerto Rico.

right now, led by a group of young men who made a lot of money on blockchain. Actually, some young, some sort of middle age who had some successes and some failures in Silicon Valley, they all made a lot of money on Bitcoin and Ethereum. And now they're trying to build a city in Puerto Rico. A physical city. Yeah, physical city. Yeah. I mean, in part just to get around the taxes and taxes in the U.S. because Puerto Rico's an advantageous system. And so to me, what's so interesting about that is that there is a big social vision here with cryptocurrency. And that's what makes it so fun to cover.

And that's what makes it not just like covering banking or something. There really are these true believers. And again, then, if you think about a utopian vision, that's why remembering gender equality, remembering also racial diversity in this space is so important. Yeah, I mean, it seems like that's the utopian vision is completely at odds with the makeup of the community. Yeah. I would just say that the women I've spoken to in this space, whether it was at South By or this morning, I was on the phone with Jenny Q.Tah, who is a Wall Street veteran, and she's now in this space. And she, like you said, she envisions this as democratizing the internet and currency.

and it's supposed to empower people, and that's exactly why she's like, women get involved. This is our chance. So we need more people like that saying that and actually doing something about it. That it could, like, disrupt the financial systems we have in place. And, you know, if you hear the kind of like end society,

the ideal end society, it's an amazingly egalitarian space with, you know, where banks have lost all power and all of us are sort of running the economy. Veronica, what are the barriers to women entering this field? Well, I think a lot of them are systemic. So kind of listening to the conversation women need to get involved, they do. But I also think, and I think the technology, to everyone's point, has the capability of democratizing the world or making it equal for all.

But not alone, right? The technology itself is morally agnostic. And I think we need to keep having these conversations. I think the Me Too movement was, you know, I think very powerful. I think for me, the big takeaway from that is women should be heard. Women should be listened to. And I think that's why we're seeing a lot of women speak out. And especially a lot of women are speaking out in the blockchain industry.

And there's women I'm working with here in L.A. And we're putting together meetups. There's one happening in a couple weeks with Melrose PR. And there's one on April 11th that we're having at Coral Tree Cafe. And then we're planning kind of a series to help new women who are looking, to enter the space come in. And I think that that's one way of many to kind of attack the systemic barriers, at least in the United States, that women have historically faced.

And you see this, like there's, I won't name who wrote this, but, you know, for example, there was a guy who wrote a blog post, and he was talking about how his firsthand experience is that women just don't want to do the work to be a part of it. So if that's your viewpoint going into it is not that women are done, but they don't want to or they're not interested. And then that's how you treat them. So when you see a woman, you just assume, oh, are you in marketing?

And really, she's an engineer. So I think that's kind of what we face. Let's go to the phones. Christina in Fort Collins. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. I was just on hold, and I lost you. If something happened.

Are you back now? You're on the air. I am. Tell us your question. Yes. I, okay. I have been interested in the blockchain technology for, I don't know, running on about five. When it first emerged, and I had had a lot of visionary experience around then on how I wanted to structure a business.

And it was sort of almost like a common type thing where everybody's represented and everybody's works with a worker-owned entity, holocracy governed, using blockchain, even potentially creating currency. And I thought I had a lot of people on board. But the problem was a lot of people didn't really understand what I was talking about. and I run into people who there's a different, you know, you're either a cooperator or you're a competitor and you can't be both. And so it's been really difficult to find the true cooperators in the community and then to have the kind of understanding. So now that it's coming out into the mainstream, I'm super excited because I still want to create the same kind of entity. And yet I don't necessarily have the tools or the time because I'm also looking out of my agriculture site and creating all kinds of

other things. So I'm wondering about mentoring. And that's my big question, I guess. I need a mentor. Thanks, Christina. I'm Flora Lickman, and this is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International. Carrie, I noticed you jumping in, no? I jump in, yeah. I guess what's been inspiring to me, like I said, I've spoken to women in the blockchain industry. And the VP of blockchain, which is a real title, VP of blockchain at IBM, is a woman. And that's awesome. And she says that her, almost her entire team is female-driven, and also IBM has a female CEO. So, yeah, there are some pretty powerful women in this space.

And, I mean, I spoke with her at South-I-Southwest, and I'm sure she would love to speak with you and with other women in the industry. And it's fascinating that. You know, this blockchain isn't just about startups and new businesses as great as that is. Blockchain is an investment that giant corporations like IBM are betting on. So go reach out to them. Veronica, any tips for mentoring or how to get in? Yeah, I would say, you know, look for meetups in your area. I didn't catch the town that she was from, but basically in every major city there's women in blockchain meetups.

And I think, you know, something that I had done was I kind of reached out. I read a blog post by Preeti Kazeridi, and it just really resonated with me and she was moving to L.A. So I just kind of reached out and said hello and we ended up connecting. So I think if there's someone in particular that kind of resonates with you in the space, I've always found reaching out and just, even saying hello can be beneficial. I think there's something intimidating about it about blockchain because it's hard to understand and wrap your mind around and because it's so new and so we're still waiting for some of these applications.

I'm not saying that it should be, but how much do I actually have to know to get involved in this space? I think it has been kept somewhat intentionally confusing. Really? I actually don't think it's as complicated as we're sort of led to believe. Really? tell me more. Like, I think there are people who benefit from obfuscating how it works.

And, but, I mean, I talked to this fantastic entrepreneur, Ariana Simpson, who, how she phrased it was, and she's in the blockchain space, was sort of women are always waiting until they're experts or they're waiting to they have a PhD in something. And she's like, but look at these sort of clowns around us. look at these people just jumping in and sort of getting rich quick on the space. You don't need an enormous amount of expertise because no one has an enormous amount of expertise. This stuff is brand new. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think the underlying technology is a little complex. I don't think people should be afraid of that.

Sometimes I do, and I don't know, maybe it's just my circle. Sometimes women seem to have a little bit more hesitation. And I think, to Nellie's point, I think we, And maybe it's a cultural thing. I'm not sure, but I think more often than not, we really want to master the space before we go off and talk about it. And I think there's a wisdom to that. There's an inherent, you know, being risk averse. Yeah.

But I also think there's this emphasis where you have to understand all of the tech. And I think like any industry, there's other aspects, for example, tokenomics that we really need knowledgeable people about. And while I do think understanding, you know, what hashing is, for example, is really important because then you understand the applications a lot. better. What's hashing? Nellie, do you want to explain that? Get out of here. I'm going to butcher it. Yeah. You know, I have a basic understanding of kind of

And just as a note, we have a minute left, so. Okay. Maybe I won't go into that, but what I will say is going onto YouTube and looking up key terms, like, what is a Diffy-Hellman key exchange, what is hashing, what is elliptical curve cryptography, you know, what is a

smart contract? Just, I think if you go and Google those things is, you know, for anyone, not just women, you're going to have a much better understanding and you'll see that it's not, yeah. That is. So I'm sorry to say that is all we have time for, and I wish we could talk more because this is so fascinating. I want to thank my guest, Nellie Bowles, reporter covering tech and internet culture. For the New York Times, Carrie Flynn reports on business of technology for Mashable.

Veronica Reynolds, co-founder of the UCLA Blockchain Lab. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten, sitting in for Ira Flato. The bird-like dinosaur Archaeopteryx was first discovered in the 1860s, and this raven-sized dino, cloaked in feathers, helped kick off the debate about the evolutionary

links between reptiles and birds. And then these days you often hear birds referred to as living dinosaurs. Like, you've probably seen that baby blue heron picture. We will tweet it. But Archaeopteryx itself, the dinosaur that started it all, remains a bit of a bit of a bit of of a mystery. Did it actually fly? Could it get off the ground? Did it glide down from trees like a flying squirrel? In new research published this week, a team of scientists turned to the fossilized wing bones for clues. They used a synchrotron, a particle accelerator, to peer inside of those

bones and look for structures that might hold clues. Here to tell us what he found is Dennis Wooten, a paleontologist and research fellow at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. He joins us by Skype. Welcome, Dennis. Hi, thank you very much for the invitation to join. Thank you for coming on. So what did you see when you looked at these bones with a particle accelerator? We visualized the mid part of the bones, specifically the humerus, which is the upper arm bone and a bone in the lower arm.

And the first moment we saw it, we immediately noticed that the bones were extremely thin walled. They look a lot like modern bird bones. And secondly, we immediately also saw that the bones were quite richly vasculated. which is consistent with a more active metabolism than was supposed by some avascular bone that was described 10 years ago from archaeopteryx. So does that mean they can fly? I would feel comfortable saying that we found these adaptations to be very consistent with flight. Like a true scientist.

Yes, we tested it against a lot of other archa-sars, which is a group that includes dinosaurs, pterosaurs and crocodiles. And within that group, archaeopteryx exclusively allies with those animals that fly. So in that regard, yes, we feel comfortable saying that it flew. Okay, so what kind of flying? Are we talking like albatross or chicken? Again, we looked at specific midparts of the bones. So for flight, you obviously require a little bit more. But because we found an indication for flight, we actually think we find an indication for active flight.

We try to reconcile it with the skeleton of archaeopteryx, and it's notoriously incompatible with the flight of modern birds. So we try to sort of delimit the range of motion that was possible with what we now know about the shoulders of archaeopteryx. And based on that, we propose for consideration a flight style that would superficially resemble a butterfly stroke. Oh, so not actually like a chicken, more graceful? I wouldn't call it graceful.

We literally have no idea what it would exactly look like, except that it probably did not look like that of a bird flying, including the flight of a chicken. So how long would they stay up in the air? How long do your measurements suggest they could stay in the air? That's a very difficult question to answer, because it obviously involves a lot of other parameters that are not so well understood,

like metabolism and muscle size and things like. like that, but because it allies with short-flying birds and they fly between a hundred meter, maybe a kilometer for European listeners, I would say it's probably not a lot more than that, and probably even quite a bit less. How does this dinosaur stack up with other flying dinosaurs? Would it be the first? Where does it fall in the timeline? Yeah, that's a very good question, because Archaeopteryx is one of the earliest known

sort of early dino birds. And we've been focusing on archaeopteryx for over 150 years now. However, originally through this, Archaeopters was considered the first bird. But recent discoveries from China have greatly enriched our understanding of this phase and has shown that there's actually quite a broad variety of flying and potentially flying dinosaurs. So although Archaeopteryx is among the oldest

and the oldest that we feel could have had active flight, there's probably a lot of other very exotic material waiting in the wing somewhere. So we're waiting for that to come out, and then we can answer your question even more accurately. Well, I look forward to that too. Thank you again. This is Dennis Wooten, a paleontologist and research fellow at the European synchrotron radiation facility, and he joined us by Skype. And if you have any follow-up questions for Dennis, he's doing an Ask Me Anything on Reddit tomorrow.

Check it out. Okay. Now, close your eyes and picture a dinosaur. Any dinosaur. Do you have one in mind? Now think about where that mental image came from. Maybe it was a drawing you saw online or a children's book or a museum exhibit. Or if you were alive before 1993, perhaps it was a certain blockbuster film about dinosaurs. Every one of those dinosaur images, though, had to be created from clues that dinosaurs left behind,

like bones and footprints and fossils and, yes, feathers. And this means that we owe our understanding of dinosaurs just as much to artists as we do to scientists, because it's the artists who take scientific evidence and turn it into a picture. And those pictures of what dinosaurs looked like have changed dramatically in the last 20 years, which means that your vision of a dinosaur might need a refresh. Here to tell us more is Gabriel Ugetto. He's a paleo artist and science illustrator who lives in Miami, Florida. He's also the subject of our latest

sci arts video. If you want to visualize the animals that he is talking about, go to our web page, sciencefriday.com slash dino art. Welcome, Gabriel. Hi. And if we welcome your questions about dinosaurs as well, do you have a dinosaur visual myth buster that you want busted? Give us a call. Our number is 844724-8255. That's 844-Sye talk. Or tweet us at SciFri.

Okay, Gabriel, I want to start with, I think, the classic dinosaur image, which is the Jurassic Park T-Rex. What is wrong with this picture? Well, back when the original film came out, not much was wrong with it. But today, I mean, with what we know, you can say that a few things. Like, for example, T-Rex probably had prominent lips. And when I'm in lips, like, most of the teeth would have been covered. It probably also has some sort of feather covering on top of its body. Really? Where?

Probably, like, around on top of, like, on the dorsal part of the neck and probably on the dorsal part of the body, per se, on the trunk. I'm thinking of a long Mohawk. Probably. I mean, we don't know. And there is no direct evidence for it. but relatives of Tyrannosaurus, early relatives of Tyrannosaurus, have been found to be completely covered in feathers from head to toe.

Wow. So, you know, Tyrannosaurus was a bigger animal, and it probably lived in a warmer climate, so he probably needed less covering, but it most unlikely still probably had some sort of covering. I mean, think about elephants, for example. They look naked, but in reality, they have small hair, like a little bit fuss on top of their bodies. Yes.

What about, are the other popular misconceptions about dinosaurs that stem from the way they're drawn or the way we see them in movies? Well, especially in Jurassic Park, I think the biggest, biggest misconception is the Raptors, like Velociraptor. The Velociraptor in the movie is much bigger than the original Velociraptor would have been, the actual Velociraptor would have been, and Velociraptor was really completely covered in feathers, and it had... Well, how small was it? Well, about the size of a turkey.

However, there was a raptor species called Utah Raptor, which was about the size of the one in the movie. But the problem is that that one would also be covered completely in feathers, and it would probably look more like a giant turkey. A very threatening turkey. A very threatening turkey, with very big claws and teeth. You also, I hear, have a beef with dinosaur skinniness.

Yes. Well, I think for a long time, paleo arts suffer from shrink-wrapping everything, skin-wrapping everything. Like, you know, there was no room for muscles or fat tissue. And if you look at animals alive today, you see how much, you know, Most of the skeletal structure is hidden by the muscles and skin and fat. So you don't see much more of the actual shape of the bone. So right now we're in the middle of like a revolution in paleo art

because a lot of artists like myself are depicting dinosaurs with what I consider is a lot more natural, more natural look, like including room for fatty tissue, muscle, and probably thinking of different types of integument, like feathers or scales in different parts of their body. Well, speaking of feathers, why do people object to the feathers? Honestly, I don't know. I mean, I think there is a people, a lot of people have this image of dinosaurs as monsters in movies.

So I think when you reconstruct them with feathers, some people, may think that they look less scary, but I actually don't think that's the case. I think that, like we were saying before, if you find a raptor that was covered in feathers but, you know, was still very much a raptor, although I don't really like to use a term raptor, but very much a Velociraptor. Why don't you like the term raptor? Well, because raptor is used in biology to refer to birds of prey originally. The movie called Dromiosaurus, which is what, raptors, they call them Rhapsors.

in the movie, but that's not the actual name. The actual name should be Dromeosaurus. Hmm. I want to go to the phones. Let's go to Tim in Oklahoma City. Hi, Tim. How are you guys doing? Great.

What's your question? My question was, what kind of, if any, modern living animals do you take measurements from to reconstruct the look of dinosaurs? I'm thinking along the lines of like John Gertie does, measuring modern humans and chimpanzees to help reconstruct tissue mass for early hominids. Yes, I think that's very important. I think looking at today's dinosaurs, which is modern birds, and their relatives like crocodiles,

is very, very important to understand how their muscles and how the other integument would be in dinosaurs. I spend a lot of times in the zoo looking at birds and crocodiles and to understand how they look and how they look at life themselves, you know, to understand how they behave because more than likely, dinosaurs would have behaved in a similar way. I'm Flora Lichten, and this is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International. Gabriel, how do you decide what colors to use? Well, I take into consideration several things.

First of all, nowadays there's a lot of super amazing discoveries in many fossils that have preserved impressions of feathers or scales. Palantolids have discovered that melanosomes, which is a structure that is responsible for color in animals, fossilize. So we can now tell more or less the coloration of some dinosaur species. Like, for example, the archaeopteryx is known to have been primarily black. So if we have skin impressions, which is very rare, we can probably say a little bit about the actual coloration. Otherwise, I look a lot of what the climate was where the animal lived, what type of habitat it lived in, what type of habitat it lived in. And what are the suggested habits that the animal had to make an educated guess of what it could have been colored? Do dinosaur feathers look the same as bird feathers?

Some. I mean, dinosaurs have a wide range of feathers, feather types. There were some that looked more like hair. They were monofilamentous. And there were other that were penacious like today's birds. for example, to give an example, Velociraptor or some other dromosaurids, had something that looked more like fuss on their bodies, but their wings, their hands had penaceous feathers like today's birds. Let's go to the phones. Let's go to Robin in Orlando, Florida. Hi, Robin. Hi, how are you today? Great.

So I have a sixth grade teacher, and I have a student who loves dinosaurs and loves drawing birds, and he's actually really, really good at it. And I was wondering what resources I could point him to to maybe look into a career in paleo art. Well, I think the most important part is the art part of the career. I mean, you have to study illustration or graphic design, something that points you in that direction. Also, there are careers specialized in scientific illustration. And I would say one of the most important things is to be familiar with your subjects. So you have to read a lot of scientific papers and get really involved in that community. Read a lot, a lot of the process for me to create an animal.

I have to research a lot and read a lot of scientific papers. So it helps a lot to know a lot about the subject. Thank you, Robin. Gabriel, have you always been a dinosaur geek? Yes. Since I remember, I mean, I was since I was a kid, and I grew up with, I grew up with the movies, and I was always interested in animals, but in particular, dinosaurs. And that took me to my other love, which are reptiles. What do you love about them?

They're just amazing animals. I think they're so, well, first of all, they look amazing. nothing that looked like them today. And they are so impressive, their size and the way they behave and how they dominated life on Earth for so long. They were so well adapted to the environment. This might be like naming your favorite children, but do you have a favorite dinosaur? No. It's very difficult, and it is like naming your favorite children. I guess, I don't know, I think I'm a little bit partial to theropods, which is this. group of dinosaurs that are carnivorous, like includes like Tyrannosaurs and Velociraptor.

But honestly, it's very difficult. I mean, I love them all. In the 10 seconds we have left, can you tell me what to look for when I look at a drawing of a dinosaur so that I know it's a good one, like that it's lifelike and good? A big-tale sign is if it is, if you can see the skull shape, the exact skull shape, in the drawing of an animal that should be alive, then it's not a good drawing. Because you're seeing something that just put it like a...

It's not a good drawing. That's a perfect place to leave it. Thank you, Gabriel. All right. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Gabriel Ugetto is a paleo artist and science illustrator in Miami, Florida. And you can see our latest sci-arts video of Gabriel's work on our website, sciencefriety.com slash dino art, courtesy of our video producer, Luke Groskin.

Charles Berkwist is our director. Our senior producer is Christopher Intagliata, and our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Hyler. And we had technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Jack Horowitz. We're active on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram all week, all social media.

And if you have a smart speaker, ask it to play Science Friday, wherever you want, whenever you want. You can email us at ScienceFri.com. Ira is back next week, and you can find me at every little thing from Gimlet Media on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In New York, I'm Flora Lichten.