 Welcome back everyone and for those of you just joining welcome to our virtual Super Science Saturday streaming live from our homes and labs to yours. Now we're about to head up to the NCAR Mesa Lab in Boulder, Colorado to join our Science Wizards for a game of hide-and-seek. Now as the game is going on if you have any questions definitely submit them to us in one of two ways either Slido which I'll pop the link in the chat right now or straight in the zoom Q&A and we'll answer them once the game wraps up. And with that let's check in with Jair Janine and Zeus about this game of hide-and-science. So hi everyone. Yes as has been talked about already today the Mesa Lab is unfortunately still close to the public which is why we're still doing this virtually but between the Mesa Lab being close to the public and most NCAR staff still working from home these days the Mesa Lab's actually a pretty great place to play hide-and-seek. So a few days ago we all got together to play this game and we had tons of fun and I hope you enjoy watching the video of us playing hide- and-seek in the Mesa Lab. It's gonna be... Jair? What are you doing up there? Oh hi Cecil, how are you? Yeah pretty good. Yeah so today I'm playing hide-and-seek with the other wizards. Oh this is a great idea as the Mesa Lab is closed. It's a perfect place to play hide-and-seek. Yeah. But you should be careful because 20 years ago they were playing hide-and-seek in the basement and they lost one of the wizards. They haven't find her yet. Oh man that's crazy. I don't know if it's true but... I've heard it too so maybe it is true. Did you find anybody up there? No you know it's pretty dark in the basement here in places. So I was trying to look with this black light and so if anyone's wearing a white shirt or something then that will glow under the black light or like this paper here. Oh this is really nice. Yeah. Did you check the weight room already? Oh I didn't. Good point. Yeah. No maybe we should go there and tell you I have another black light so if you want to take this one. I would love to help you. Yeah let's go. Let's go together. Yeah. After the weight room. The weight room is here. Oh good yeah. And that's not getting much use while the building's closed so it's going to be a great hiding spot. Yes. Then how does a black light work? Yeah. So certain chemicals absorb light and they give it out again. They give it out again and in fact some laundry detergents have phosphorus in them and that makes clothes kind of glow bright in sunlight. We call that phosphorescence because it comes from phosphoridin. Yeah but it's true. Look at my socks. Oh wow yeah. That's pretty cool. That's working really well. Hopefully we can find someone. Yes let's keep looking maybe the white socks. You got me. Who is it? Oh let me turn the light on. Yes I am Zeus. Your wizards are amazing. How did you find me? This is because of the black light. Oh. Is there something in my hair? There must be. There must be some dye in your hair that phosphoresces. Oh. How's about that? Well look at this. Yes. Well congratulations. Found him. Are there any more wizards left to find? Yes you are the first one. Oh okay let's go look for some more wizards. I think I will look in the basement and why don't you go upstairs. Yeah we'll go to the cray. That'd be a good place to hide. Okay off we go. Okay I'm doing the basement. Okay see you later. Well here we are at the old cray computer. I guess the black light's not gonna work here because it's way too bright. So we have to find... true story. Back in 1989 I took a tour of cray research in Chippewa Falls Wisconsin and they gave us and showed us proudly the new cray YMP. This machine was loaded. It had 256 megabytes of main memory. Wow 256. Imagine what you could do with that. Hold on megabytes. Yeah yeah. My phone has 10 times more than that. Oh that's right. Things have changed a lot haven't they? So cell phone. I know that one of the wizards has forgotten to turn off their ringer. Oh yeah. So call the wizard hotline number and we'll be real quiet and listen so we can hear anything. One ring-a-ding-y. Two ring-a-ding-y. And car wizards how can we help. With technology. Great. Well I'm gonna go off down these hallways and keep looking for people. You guys want to team up and try and find someone else? Yeah. Sounds good. Have fun. You know that cell phone ringer trick works only once. Yeah so you got an idea? I have this carbon dioxide analyzer. Let me show it to you. Oh here you hold the computer. Okay. We built this to bike up and down the Mesa Lab Hill but we've now converted it to be a backpack version. So it's gonna suck in air if you turn on the pump on the back. Right. Yep and then the carbon dioxide concentration is going to read out right there and because people breathe out carbon dioxide I think we might be able to sniff out a wizard. Oh cool. Which way do you think we should go? Let's head toward the auditorium. All right follow me. We got them now. 450 parts per million. 460. Let's check in here. Okay 650, 780, 1000 ppm. I think you got one. Aha a wizard. Oh man. Come on out. I thought this was a great hiding spot in there. What were you doing in there? Well I wasn't sure how long I was going to be in their hiding so I brought in these snow crispy treats that Chef Nancy made for us but found me too quickly so I didn't get to have one. I'm going to go look by the lightning exhibit and see what I can find. Good idea. See you later Zeus. Well unfortunately you were breathing in there. Next time I have to remember to hold your breath. Okay I guess I got to practice that for next time. So there are some more wizards that we need to find and they're probably just as hungry as I am and these snow crispy treats are a great way to lure out a wizard. Ah yes. So I think we should go upstairs and see if we can find any up there. All right let's do it. Oh hey here's a library Brit. That might be a great place for a wizard to hide. What do you think? Oh great idea. I'm just going to read this thing about carbon dioxide first. Come on Brit we got we have wizards to find. Oh all right. No Brit this really is a great place to hide and I can't believe what they've done with this library since I was last here. Yeah there's all kinds of wizardly things here. That's so cool. I bet there's somebody hiding around here somewhere. We need to find the perfect spot for this. I think there's a good spot right over here. Cool. I'll bet you there's a wizard somewhere around so we've got to find good hiding spots but not too far away so here Brit how about you go over here and I'm going to hide right in here so I can keep an eye on the snow crispy treats. Snow crispy rice treats. My favorite. I love them. Found you. I've been hiding here for a long time. You must have been hungry. I was really hungry. You got me. I love these. These are my favorite. Well I think there are some other wizards that we need to go find so how about we go down to the mezzanine. I think there's some good spots around there and hey don't you have an infrared camera? Yes I do have an infrared sensor maybe that will help us find these other wizards that are hiding in this building. That sounds like fun but I got some weird co2 readings from the roof so I'm going to go check that out first. All right you guys have fun. Good idea. Good luck. All right come on Jeff let's let's go. I'm taking this room. Those other wizards are right. These rice crispy treats are such good brain food. You know this really is a great place for a wizard to hide so I'm pretty sure we'll find someone here. Yeah hey I've got this IR camera and it's infrared and with it we can see heat signatures. We might be able to track down the other wizards using this infrared camera. That's such a cool way. Let's let's see if it works. Let's see what we can find. Wait look. I see footsteps. They're going to the main seminar room. I bet you the wizard is curious what it looks like now that it's being renovated. Let's go find out. Right. Wow it sure is dark in here. Do you hear music? Is your camera showing anything Jeff? Whoa look at that. I'm picking up a heat signature right in the middle of the main seminar room. That that looks like a person flying and twirling. What how can how can that be? Yeah she's so much warmer than the rest of the environment that the infrared cameras picking up her heat signature incredibly well. That might be do you think that's a wizard? They're spinning around and floating in the air. Maybe it is a wizard. I've never seen a flying wizard before. I'm trying to think of who we haven't found yet. It's say do you think that could be Christina? I think it's a wizard. I think we found one. Look at that. Oh definitely. Christina we found you. Hey Christina. Come on down Christina we've got you. And Christina what you did in there was so cool. Thank you. Amazing. Make wizards fly. Yeah well to stay in the air you have to balance or counteract the force of gravity and there are a couple ways to do that. The first is you can pull all yourself up using your muscles. The second is that you can wrap the fabric around your body and when you get enough wraps those wraps to create friction then the force of the friction balances gravity and you stay in the air. That makes sense. That's so great. So I've never seen a flying wizard before but you know I still think there are a couple wizards here that we haven't seen. They must have a really good hiding spot. I have an idea how we can find them. Do it. All right let's go. It's so cool. Well you were the last one we found so you're the winner. Yes. Yeah great game everyone so same time next week. All right well let's head out and have some snacks. I can't believe they still haven't found me. Awesome. I think Janine's the true winner for not being found right. So Janine I was wondering you know there was that missing poster of you that we saw a few times during the video. Is there any significance to your photo on that missing poster? That photo was taken when I was about 20 years old. I was a student assistant at NCAR and so I have worked at NCAR a really long time and that is my staff photo. It's still hanging on the wall in HAO which was the first group I worked with. Wow that's amazing. Well I should point out that that Cray 1 in the basement of NCAR is not the Cray YMP that I saw in Tipua Falls. The Cray 1 was located there and installed in 1970s and it had one megabyte of memory which was screaming the amount of memory at the time and scientists were very happy to have that and run real powerful atmospheric models on that supercomputer. Yeah it's crazy how quickly things have advanced in really a short period of time it hasn't been all about long. Cool so we have about 10 minutes to dive into some questions and answers and we have a couple coming through on the chat particularly about some of the instrumentation y'all were using to define the different wizards and Nicholas is specifically wondering about the the CO2 analyzer that Britt had and how that works and Nicholas also say that we have a whole show on the CO2 analyzer coming up this afternoon so maybe we can briefly quickly answer what is the CO2 analyzer. So I think I could take a stab at that so that that long tube that was on the instrument it it sucks in air and then in the pack there's yeah in the pack there's an infrared gas analyzer and so it's able to use light to use light to sense what what gases are in the air that's being sucked in how basically how much carbon dioxide got it and there's there's also a number of other instruments that y'all have used in there too you know the black light at the beginning some of the infrared stuff can you tell us a little bit about how those instruments worked do you want to go first the black white makes things phosphorus so that's things that are white and like my teeth was really my teeth were really bright my hair just a little bit so things that have like Jeff said the the phosphor in them to make them white the bleach things those are the things that you're gonna light up and the infrared is measuring heat so heat emits light I'll call it away but it's not something our eyes can pick up but the infrared sensor can pick it up so we're emitting that all the time but you can see it when you look at it with an infrared sensor and the CO2 sensor that Britt had on his back we make bigger ones and more streamlined ones we put them on the wings of airplanes and fly around and measure not just carbon dioxide but all complicated chemicals like formaldehyde monoturpeans and all sorts of things that use carbon compounds and we fly around places over forests and over wildfires and measure lots of chemicals using similar technology to what you saw on Britt's back that makes sense and then Nicholas had one other question how does a telescope work and I think they might have been referring to the solar telescope that was in that last shot with everybody so a telescope has a huge lens on it it's a shaped kind of like a bowl and it concentrates small amounts of light that it can pick up into something that's bright enough that we can see it ah that does make sense cool and speaking of that room at the end you called all the scientists with their kelvin helm holds cloud can you tell us what is it kelvin helm holds cloud so I can I can take that so a kelvin helm holds cloud if you look at it it basically it's it's a kind of a long thin cloud but then it looks like it has a bunch of waves kind of like ocean waves on it and that's because like if you go to the ocean and you see the surf coming in the waves coming into the shore that is also what's called the kelvin helm holds instability and explaining what exactly that instability is takes a lot of math and physics but basically you you have different densities of air or water in the case of if you see it in the ocean basically causing causing these wave breaking events and so it's really neat to see them up in the up in the sky we see them fairly frequently here in Colorado not super common but if you keep your eye out and you see you see a cloud that looks like it has these breaking waves like you'd see on the surf that's a kelvin helm holds cloud and they are really cool so it's no wonder it drew everyone out at the end and as you watch them you can see the waves move and break over each other if you watch them up in the sky so Jared in the ocean we see waves near the shore where it's more shallow are we seeing them here on the front range because of the mountains making the atmosphere kind of more shallow because the mountains are tall well I think there's definitely there are definitely layers of air of more dense or less dense air so I think that is part of it but I actually have seen kelvin helm holds clouds before actually in the middle of north dakota of all places when we were driving back to visit family in minnesota I was really surprised to see them there because there isn't a whole lot of complex terrain in the middle of north dakota so they happen in more places than just here and you were late to arrive for the family reunion because it was so exciting I definitely pulled over the car and took pictures even though it was about 10 degrees outside so even even we really do get excited about kelvin helm holds clouds that's totally fair and the chat violet has a great point about how a telescope is kind of like a spoon when you look into it and it looks super magnified when you're sharing in there so that's a great common violet so as we wait for some other questions to maybe come in from the audience it seemed like there was a lot of rooms and spaces in the mesa labs so just how big is the mesa lab and what kind of stuff goes on up there that's a good question I couldn't tell you how many square feet I know there are lots of towers and hallways and definitely tons of different spaces labs usually in the basement and I certainly have gotten lost up here before especially in the especially in the basements the basements are they can be a bit maze like so an interesting thing I heard was the architect iam pay thought that scientists liked to work in kind of maze like places and he did that on purpose so we have him to blame for it yes I have not heard that before he camped up on the mesa before the towers and anything else that was built just to get a feel for the place and kind of wanted something that would fit in so sort of the reddish rock that you see on the outside of the mesa lab is supposed to look at the flat irons and the other rocks on the side of green mountain and bare mountain so it's supposed to fit in the mesa as a sort of a natural thing even though of course this is a building where we do scientific research and the next time that you are able to come up to the mesa lab once we finally do open up to the public again in that final room by the telescope where everyone popped out there actually is a pretty big exhibit there about about iam pay the architect who designed the mesa lab and just kind of how it was built and everything so encourage you next time you are able to come up here definitely take some time and take a look at that too we have a cloud bowl and a tornado and drop songs and a lot of other things that are really neat to see so hopefully that will happen soon yeah fingers crossed so i do see a question for christina i don't know if christina is in zoom quite yet but maybe one of y'all can answer it about how did she spin around on the aerial silks like i believe she's going to type in an answer in in the chat to be able to answer that because i mean we're just we're just amazed watching her we we don't really know how she did that it's beyond our wizardly abilities i see she just popped in so i'll give it a second for that time with the mic sure i don't have the best background for the video here um but basically what you do is you wrap the fabric around your body in a way that enables you to stay in the air and then to get yourself figure out how to apply force to make yourself spin when you're hanging right yeah so when you're on something when you're spinning you generally grab the the tail that's hanging below you and you rotate your arm and you spin in the opposite direction that you're rotating your arm so that's how you get that's how you like that's pretty cool i'm i'm definitely not that coordinated so i'm very impressed let's see oh there's one other question that came in from uh nicolas going back to the trace gas analyzer um or i'm sorry the infrared gas analyzer i'll get that right at some point um how hard was it to make that um and maybe since y'all since i was brits machine you know how hard in general maybe is it to create some of these instruments that we use so the instruments i've been involved with have a whole teams associated with them and can take years to develop we have um at in car a machine shop that can you know make little parts for us out of metal they have all kinds of 3d printing all the stuff we need to do that and we have people who are engineers who make their designs they write the designs for how to do this stuff we analyze it we have project managers we have software engineers like me who have to then write code to analyze that data and make the plot that you were seeing on the computer when they found jared so yeah it's a whole team and it can be a multi-year process to come up with a new scientific instrument and then when you're really happy with the machine you have to put it in a rack and have a little tube which goes outside the airplane to a little tube that collects the air and brings it back out inside and measures things all this happening at 25 000 feet so um also there are some inexpensive scientific instruments out there however they tend to be less accurate for instance you can get um co2 sensors that can for instance sense someone breathing or you might see them sometimes in schools or restaurants to tell you what the co2 concentration is inside that room kind of as a proxy for how well is the room ventilated which has relevance for what is the risk for spread of airborne diseases like COVID-19 for instance because if the if there's high carbon dioxide concentrations in the room then the room isn't being ventilated very well and you might be getting build-up of other nasty aerosols that could make us sick so the expensive ones do take a lot more time and effort to put together um to be a lot more accurate but there are some less expensive less accurate ones out there too so kind of do get what you pay for definitely and Brett actually just texted me that too that there's some inexpensive ones not very accurate and then the ones on our airplanes are several hundred thousands of dollars um cool so we're nearing the the top of the hour i want to give a big thanks to Cecile, Jeff, Janine, Carl, Brett, Jared, Jeff, Christina, and Kate thank you so much for participating in our game of hide and science um we do have a survey on Slido if y'all are interested in providing feedback and Tiffany will pop the link into the chat there we're going to take a 30 minute break and we hope to see y'all back here at the bottom of the hour 12 30 mountaintime for our next show with our friends from Beanstalk so hope to see you then