So we hear the super computing show here in Denver and you have a whole bunch of new announcements, right? Yes. So now Thunder X2 is about to be shipping? Yep. So let's see some of the systems that you're showing off. Yeah, so let's start from here. This is the platform that HPE Hewlett-Beckard enterprises announced at the show actually yesterday and this is part of their Apollo family. Apollo is their high-performance computing platforms and this is called Apollo 70. It's a 2U 4-node high-density platform. This is one of their volume products and this has two Thunder X2 processors with eight memory channels per socket, delivering about 33% higher memory bandwidth and 33% higher memory capacity compared to the computing solutions and you can actually fit four of them here and this delivers very high core count and very high memory density to the end user. The high-performance computing applications that actually benefit from high memory bandwidth and higher core count you know are going to be able to really see the performance differences. There were a number of performance benchmarks announced by our customers HPE as well as Cray and some of the national labs at this conference and it's actually really exciting. So the benchmarks that's the big deal to announce this right? Yes. And 33% better than Intel? Intel, yeah. On the memory. What Intel? The best Intel? Yes, the top Intel. The top Intel. The platinum? Platinum. It's the you know they have six memory channels we have eight and that gives us higher memory bandwidth. So you have higher memory bandwidth is one of the most important things to have high memory. Yes, for high performance. How high, how many gigabytes you do? So the measured performance that we are showing shows about 132 gigabytes per second in memory bandwidth and this is a number that our customers are sharing with their end users and that's about 33% higher than the high-end Skylake platforms. So having a higher memory bandwidth helps with also being 33% more efficient? It helps with a number of applications in the high-performance computing space because they need higher memory bandwidth and we are showing performance benchmarks for those. And HPC, this is a supercomputing conference but the stuff you do is not only for supercomputing but when you announce stuff here it means everything is available for the whole market. Yeah, of course. So we play in the cloud and HPC space so the platforms that we are showing are of course you know for the high-performance computing market but then HPEs also sell similar platforms for the cloud. And that's for example right here Google Cloud, Amazon Cloud, all these customers should potentially use these kinds of platforms. They can buy this now. Of course. And let's look at the other one over there, it's a big one. So this is the platform from Cray. Cray is a very famous supercomputing company. They invented supercomputing. So Cray has a very high-end platform called XC50, this is their flagship product and this is a blade that goes into XC50 platform. It has 800x2 processors. 800x2 processors as you can see here and it ties into their fabric through Aries which is Cray's fabric which provides very high bandwidth and very low latency for the supercomputing applications and this was launched along with a number of Cray customers quoting you know about how great this platform was. So you have eight chips. Eight processors. They work perfectly together. Yes. How do you do it? How do you design a chip that can work together? Cray has a fabric that interconnects these processors. We have dual socket processors so they use four of those dual socket processor blocks in here to deliver the net performance. And lots of RAM. Lots of memory. Yes. And this is their network. This is their network. So this connects to, this connects those processor complexes also ties them into their cluster. Okay so when Cray ships a product they actually ship an entire what they call a cabinet and the cabinet consists of lots of these processors, processor cards. So potentially maybe this one could be number one in the world supercomputer in this year. This is going to, well this is something which is like top 500 class supercomputer right. So Cray has a number one position in terms of the total number of systems in the top 500 at the top 100 or top 10 and you know with the introduction of something like XC50 this really helps us to play in that space. So potentially is it going to be your solution in ARM that could be in the top like beat the Chinese? That I don't know. Of course. Of course. That I don't know whether it can beat the top you know top 10. It's a question of you know customers now have an option to deploy ARM supercomputer which they didn't have before. So this is a volume HPC play. Volume. Okay so this goes to you know high density, high performance, a platform. This one is the real you know scientific academics, labs, national labs, yeah. NASA. Yeah those guys. There was something awesome also at the HPE they were showing the machine. Yes. Are you excited by this? Yes. Yes so machine the only processor that actually supports the Gen Z today with the machine is Cavium Thunder X2 CPU. So the beauty of that is Thunder X2 has a coherent interconnect and they have a chip that connects Thunder X2 into Gen Z fabric. Okay and that is great because now the memory actually can be remote and multiple Thunder X2 blades can actually share the memory across them. So this is what HP calls memory centric computing and this is one of the largest R&D projects in HPE's history. This was launched in May of this year and we're very excited to be a part of that. So you're part of the Gen Z consortium. Yes. Yes. Maybe you could do one thing I wonder is because you have so many things in the SOC but some you have networking too right? Well you have a network in there but you can also have it externally. So this so our networking is industry standard networking right so you know for high performance computing they want ultra low latency interconnects and the Cray fabric actually enables ultra low latency interconnects into their cabinet. So it's great because it gives customers in the high performance computing space a choice in terms of you know having a very high performance interconnect which allows them to have higher scalable performance for their applications. Over there is this the Gigabyte? So this is the Gigabyte channel product this they announced this at Computex and now they're actually launching this into production. This uses the BGA version of Thunder X2 Silicon. These are all LGA so they have socket socket so you can actually just like X86 you can replace the CPU right? Yeah.  There's no it's not a socket you don't need to take it out. You don't have to because you know now that way you can save the cost on the motherboard you can save the cost of the socket so if you know exactly what you want you can actually you know just socket the part and that actually saves you money. Gigabyte did an interesting thing over here right? You can add a whole bunch of... Yeah so they have a they have a riser card so they take advantage of all the PCIe lanes we have in the chip so they can actually support lots of different kinds of PCIe cards including full-height adapters and this platform can be used for storage because it has lots of drives. And but we're here at the supercomputing this is not necessarily a supercomputing product right? Oh it could be. It can be okay so this is more like a traditional 2U 2 socket server which is which could be cloud it's like the workhorse of computing right? One of the most popular form factors in the server market is a 2 socket server. Super computing has more high-density platforms which are targeted to more compute but this one gives you storage and compute. So this one compared to an Intel solution it's like 2x better or how do you compare? So it depends on the application and you know what we are showing is I think we talked about memory bandwidth we are showing integer performance we're showing floating point performance we are showing some of the HPC application performance okay and you know we are actually very very competitive relative to the latest Intel processors. There's even some other announcements that have been here to show. It's been very very busy show right? Yes it is. So we have this platform this is from Foxconn Ingressus and it's the same kind of 2U 4 node system and these are more cloud oriented platforms you know some of the cloud guys buy directly from the ODMs they don't go through OEMs so they have platforms that they can get these are all tier one ODM partners so we have announcement from them we also have announcement from our partners for example MicroSemi announced support of their RedAdapter which goes into this platform for storage so we have had a number of announcements from our partner the other exciting thing is that RedHat actually announced production support for the HP platform over there right? This is the first time RedHat is actually announcing production rel support for ARM. And that's a big deal? It's a very big deal because lot of the enterprise customers and lot of the HPC customers actually use standard RedHat and it gives customers a choice in terms of you know running exactly the same set of applications that they used to run. The other exciting thing is that Bull who is a European company won an award for the best collaboration with their Mont Blanc project for the Sequenoblade which is based on Thunder X2 ARM CPU so they won HPC Insider Award. We're very excited about that they have a liquid cooled system and they're going to talk more about it at the birds of feather session tomorrow. It sounds like crazy crazy busy right now. Yes it is. Yes it is. It's exciting. Thunder X1 was great but it was like a stepping stone for what's happening now right? Exactly. Exactly. Now you see all the OEM platforms you see broad ecosystem we are showing performance which used to be you know so and not just us our customers are showing performance on this platform and if you notice at this show it's our customers who are actually talking about their products it's not Cavium talking about our product and that's how we want it to be. Beautiful companies like Cray showing this amazing stuff. Exactly. And the HPE getting very excited with the machine. The machine could change a lot in the future right? Exactly. It could change like the whole architecture of super computing. Exactly. Well it's not just super computing it's also enterprise computing right because you know by having memory that is shared across multiple compute nodes you actually have a much better utilization of memory and you can actually with storage class memory now you can share that that changes the computing paradigm and we're very excited about our partnership. And there was Foxconn ingress stuff too. Yeah. So that's this one right there. So all the big guys are part of this. Yes. Everybody's excited. And hopefully right there we're going to actually announce that they deploy data centers with this. It's ready. It's ready right? Yes. Our goal is to actually make the platforms ready. Have the ecosystem there. Have the performance there so that you know it makes it it removes all the barriers to adoption of this architecture in the data center. And for high performance.


Ahoy-hoy and welcome to the video. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor. And today we're going to go over the dank memes from the dank memes inside 19 subreddit. This is a compilation of two different, uh, weeks. Well, a whole month's worth of memes. Uh, there's not more than normal. Uh, this actually allows me to kind of narrow it down to ones that I particularly like instead of some that I don't have a whole lot to speak about. So that's a nice idea. Might keep doing it. Might not. Not really sure you know, um, this one is by Zeal. Me explaining an SCP, my conspiracy theorist relatives. Yeah. This is certainly something I could see happening.  Yes. This is absolutely a thing that's going to happen at a dinner table. One of these days, if it hasn't already happened, conspiracy theories are crazy. Y'all will talk about me. I think I've done some videos, which involved talking about that a little bit. This one is my shoulder. Mobile task force members contain a specialist researchers, the personnel who take close up pictures of dangerous anomalies. Yeah. I've noticed in some articles, the context of the art articles image doesn't really make any sense. I think the most prevalent example that I can think of off the top of my head is 682, or at least unless they've changed the image, but it looks like he's posing for like an Instagram or something. It is he's he's supposed to be this dangerous, scary monster, and it just looks like he's relaxing on some hill somewhere, looking over the beautiful scenery. And it just doesn't make any sense. It's yeah. This meme is by Ash Kruger. All right, get lost, all of you. You're fired.  I made that one up. Not pot, not Pada physics, pasta physics, the Department of dance. Get out of here. You have moochers, Department of intercourse, Department of Minecraft. I am pretty sure the Department of Minecraft is real. That's right. Keep moving, except you.  Yeah, see. The department there's not a department. Hey, wait a second. That isn't a department. Is it? Did I make it as a department? I don't think I made it as a department. It could be a department of its own.  I like that article still so much. Even the people, a lot of people might be bothered that their most popular article isn't one of the deeper pieces they've written, but it's just the one about a bunch of seals, a Carl. But hey, you know what? I'm happy with it. This meme is by high break dash J. Secret lab, unity remake, containment breach, SCP to four or five. Yeah, see, this is the thing. Every once in a while, I will see someone say, wouldn't it be really cool if there was an SCP that was also a video game? And I'm like, there already is one. I made it like five to seven years ago. Somewhere in that area, I think. SCP to four or five exists and you could just, you know, that that's that's fine. It's it's it's fine. It's not bad. I think it's it could be better. I mean, in retrospect, it's one of those things where it's like you finish a thing and it was my very, very first attempts at working with anything with RPG maker. And yeah, I mean, but I also you. I also contextualized the usage of base assets. So it was like one of those things were like, well, you're the SCP foundation. Why would you get an artist and create custom art and a custom game for this containment of this anomaly when it comes with stuff? Just use the default art. And that's sort of the context of the article. I do kind of wish that that didn't need to be a thing, but it was. This means by optimistic Lucio. And one thing about it that always sticks out to me is every time, every time there is an article that has lots of pluses and negatives and a huge discussion page and a low rating, usually around zero, hovering either below or above above it, but just around zero. People are stuck in this mode where they're like, is this the most controversial article ever? No, what happens is is once people stop talking about these, either the creator or the site decided it's not worth keeping up eventually. The ratings tend to drift downwards once people stop caring so much about it or the authors like, I don't want to have this low rated thing dragging down my average. So it's deleted. That's the thing every time. But every time it happens, someone's like, I've never seen anything like this before. Yeah, yeah, we've seen it. I've been here for a while, been here for about 10 years. It happens a lot. You're not special. At least you're not unique. It doesn't happen that often. Let me be clear. I'm being a little exaggerating a bit here, but it happens. Stop pretending like it's unique every time. This one is by Puzzle-Headed Mode 302. How society and comics treat, comics and movies treat people with superhuman abilities? How society actually treats them? Or it should say how society actually would treat them. You're coming with us. Yeah, if you found out that, if the government finds out that someone has superhuman abilities, that person is probably going into a lab somewhere because it's important to figure out, how is this happening? How are you breaking physics? That's important to know. You know, magic exists. That seems like the kind of thing that we should probably find out how that happens because otherwise the world could end in any moment. We wouldn't understand why. Foundation classification department. This is a shouldering. Foundation classification department. When the anomaly is a box and they can't figure out how the box metaphor works now. You can put a box in a box. What are you talking about? Also, I believe the classification department's metaphor for boxes is literally, there is a thing for the anomaly is a box. There's some context to it though. Either way, this is meaning, this is wrong, shoulder. Shoulder, you got this one wrong. This is actually a compilation of two different meme collections. I actually was able to select down to the ones I really thought I had something to say about. Trying to keep it short too, so I didn't pick a whole lot of any of the individual ones. This is over the whole last month. And I may continue doing this. I'm not 100% sure. I'm kind of still trying to figure this out because also, it's nice to have an assured piece of content every two weeks. But I'm trying to get back to doing two videos a week. Anyway, thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that. And then head on over to patreon.com forward slash decimarian. Pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including Sinjeriki and Christina Amos who both pledged at $100. And remember, now on Patreon, you can pledge and it will only charge you at the time you pledge. And from then on, on the day you've pledged forever, hopefully. Thank you for letting me know that I'm not alone out here and I will see you all again on Tuesday, hopefully.


Okay. I think it should be recording. Do you see a little record button, Mark? Like a little thing at the top that says that it's recording? Yep, we do see that. Great. Great. Hi everybody. Welcome to our Ask NCAR program. My name is Mark and I'm a science educator at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This is in Boulder, Colorado. I'm with my colleague, Donna Colomber-Darzy, and she's a project scientist in global change ecology at NCAR. Of course, we're each in our own homes just like you are today, but we're still doing our work and we'd like to share it with you. Each week, we meet with someone who works at NCAR and learn about what they do at their jobs and answer questions from those of you who are joining us. Maybe some of you have already sent in questions ahead of time, but if you haven't, that's okay. Please feel free to write in the chat box anytime and I will monitor the chat box and I'll get back to you between breaks or at the end. One really cool part about working at a place like NCAR is there are so many different types of jobs, such as being a scientist, an engineer, an electrician, a computer programmer, a safety expert, a machinist. All these different jobs and more help support our scientific research. Now I'm going to turn it over to Donica who's going to tell you more about what she does and then take questions at the end. Hi everyone. It's nice to see all of your faces. I hope you're all doing well in this work at home and stay at home situation. I am a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and my research, what I do every day is I try to understand how to keep plants growing in our changing world. And to do this, I study things like how air pollution and climate change affect plants, how plants can help us to combat climate change, and how we can continue to grow our food as our environment changes. So today I'm going to share one of my favorite projects with you. I want to start by looking at a photo of a leaf. So this is a leaf of a plant called a cut-leaf coneflower. What do you see on this leaf? Do you notice anything unusual about this leaf? You can enter a chat in the chat box too if you want to. All right, maybe we should go to the next leaf, Tim, and see if anybody notices anything unusual there. Ooh, dots. It has spots. Yeah. Okay.  You see some spots. Yeah, this is a picture of a milkweed. You see the same thing. I think that there are two more photos that we can look at. Do these plants look healthy to you? We're getting a lot of information like pale around the edges, lots and lots of spots. We're seeing the black spots. That doesn't look very healthy. Well, good. So it doesn't look very healthy. Any idea what might be causing this damage? They look tasty. They don't look healthy. Atmosphere, ozone, bugs, disease or pests. So those are all good guesses. And so what I'm going to tell you actually is that this is caused by air pollution. Do you ever think that we could see air pollution on plants, the effect on plants? Probably not. It was a surprise to me too when I first learned about it. So these are plants that are just growing in a garden outside of our National Center for Atmospheric Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. They're just exposed to regular air, just the kind of air that you and I breathe. But we have high air pollution here in Boulder and the specific pollutant that's high is ozone. So ozone can be confusing because you've probably heard about it in the ozone layer and that's where it's helpful. But it's taught in the air that we breathe. Tim, can you go to the next slide? Yeah. So here's a diagram of the layers of our atmosphere. As you can see, we have our atmosphere is really quite large. And in the stratosphere, this sort of the darker blue color, the second from the bottom, that's where the ozone layer is. And so ozone is a molecule that is three oxygens that are all connected together. And in the stratosphere, the ozone is beneficial to us because it blocks sun's harmful UV rays from hitting the Earth's surface.  But that same exact chemical, those three oxygen molecules, when they're in the air that we breathe in this troposphere layer that's at the bottom, then it's toxic to us. And anytime that we have to breathe ozone, it's toxic to us. It's just that when it's in the stratosphere, we're not breathing it. So I'm going to be focusing today on ground level ozone, thinking about this. And so this is ozone that occurs in the troposphere. And the way that ozone forms is not, it doesn't come out of your tailpipe. So it's a really tricky pollution problem because it's formed in the atmosphere. And we call that a secondary pollutant and it means that it doesn't come from a specific source, but it's actually chemically, it's formed through chemical reactions in our atmosphere. And so the chemicals that reacts to form with ozone are things like nitrogen oxides, which you see on the screen here is NOx NOx. And so that's all the reactive nitrogen oxides that you can find in the atmosphere. So that can be NO or NO2. And then we also need volatile organic compounds, which we call VOCs.  Actually, a lot of paints are now low VOCs, but the smell of gasoline, for example, or the smell of French fries. Those are volatile organic compounds that are causing those smells. And so we need both of those chemicals in the air and also sunlight. And when you have sunlight, it catalyzes this reaction, meaning it makes it speed up. It happens a lot faster. And that's what forms ground level ozone. So it's a tricky pollution problem. And it affects plants. What do you think it's doing to us? Do you think it's good for us? It's doing that to plants? No, probably not. So I'll show you a few more photos, Tim, if you want to go through the next few slides. So this is cone flower. On the top is cone flower on June 11th. On the bottom is August 23rd. Do you notice the difference between these two plants? For these two leaves? Yep. Looks yellow and spotted on the bottom. Yeah, dots and yellowing. I'm seeing some of these comments come in. It's lighter and speckly. It's true. And that's because the ozone has to get inside the leaf and then it does damage. And so the longer the leaf is exposed to ozone, the more damage it can get. Do you want to, Tim, maybe the next? I think that there's two more. Yep. So this is the snap bean plant. And you can see on the top, the snap bean looks much healthier. And on the bottom, you can see that there are some really terrible looking leaves. They look like they've been damaged quite a bit. And so this is all, like I said, this is all damaged just from ground level ozone. One of the things that I want to point out here on this photo is the fact that you see those top leaves, those are the new leaves, and they look bright green. And then the leaves on the bottom, those are the older leaves, and those are the leaves that look damaged. And so that can give you a better indication of how this ozone damage can accumulate through time on the plant leaves. Yeah, I think one more, Tim. This is a milkweed leaf. And so you can see the same thing between the top and the bottom. So one other thing that I want to point out is one of the things that you can see here, you can't see it maybe as well as on some of the other photos. But the damage only occurs on the top surface of the leaf, and it only occurs in between the leaf veins. And it starts off as these dark colored spots, as you saw in the cone flower and in the snap bean and in the milkweed photos earlier. And so one of the things that stands out is that the leaf veins are not affected by ozone damage. And that's one of the major characteristics that you can see to identify whether or not this is ozone damage. Monica, there's a great question out there. I know it's hard to follow. So somebody wanted to know, how can you tell the damage is from ozone and not just maybe from not getting watered right? Yeah, well, that's a great question. And water is important. So Tim, maybe skip down to the third slide after this. Slide number 12. The next one. Yeah, there you go. So this is not ozone damage. And I wanted to illustrate this because there are very characteristic symptoms that something is, that something on the leaf is ozone damage. One is that the spots are usually dark, so they can be brown or black or purplish. They're usually dark. They occur on the top surface of the leaf. So when you flip over the leaf, you shouldn't see it on the bottom, at least when the ozone damage is in the early phases. Once the leaf starts to die a little bit more, then you get to start to get more damage. But like I was just saying, it doesn't cross the leaf veins. And so this picture that's on the left side of your screen, that looks like it could be ozone damage because it has a lot of dots and they're on the top surface of the leaf. But if you look closely, you can see that these dots are overlapping with the central vein, and that's how I know that it wasn't ozone damage.  And that's because this was insect poop that was on the leaf. It wasn't actually ozone damage. On the on the right, you see that the spots are light in color. And that's this these spots are caused by a leaf hopper insect, which goes in and eats the top part of the leaf out. So both of these actually can mimic ozone damage and they look a little bit like ozone damage. But they're not for those, for those reasons, because they either cross the leaf veins, they're not the dark colored spots or, you know, maybe sometimes you can see the damage going through to the bottom, which indicates that it's probably not ozone damage. Ozone damage can look a little bit different on the different types of leaves that you see. And so getting used to what it looks like is really helpful on the certain kinds of plants. You know, there's a question or three out there. One was, you know, why was the milkweed looking less damaged than the others? Is there a reason maybe one plant looks worse than the other? Or was it just when your pictures were taken? Yeah, so there's a, those are, these are all great questions. And so one of the, there are a few things. One is that sometimes the milkweed leaves come out later in the season. The plants don't start growing as early as some of the other plants. So that could be one reason. But another big reason is that even though ozone can enter the leaves of all plants, it does not damage all plants the same way. And that is because plants can stop ozone from entering the leaf by closing their pores. They have pores on the bottoms of their leaves that are called stomata. And those are specialized cells that open and close in response to environmental cues like sunlight or water availability. And so when the plants, the plants, this is another part of the reason why the previous question asking about not being well watered is also important because when the plants are drought stressed, or if there's high levels of ozone, they might close their stomata so that they're not losing water or that they're not letting ozone into the pores of the leaves. So that is one defense that a plant can have against ozone is to not let the ozone enter, to try not to let the ozone in. But sooner or later that plant is going to need to get the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that it makes into food. And so it does have to open those pores at some point if it wants to survive so that it can get the carbon to make the food it needs. And at that point it will allow ozone inside the leaf. But the leaf also different plants can have different amounts of what we call antioxidants, which are things that maybe you've heard of. Sometimes they're in lotions or in fruits, antioxidants are really important because ozone is what we call an oxidant, meaning it causes oxidative damage. And that has that capacity. And so these antioxidants will scaven to the ozone and it'll sort of eat the ozone up and not let it damage the plant. So there's differences across different species of plants in terms of their sensitivity to ozone. And there is also, there are also differences even within one species of plant and it can be based on genetic differences within those plants. So, you know, you and your brother or sister might have the same parents but you do have slightly different, you know, you're all somewhat different. You're all in the same family. You don't look identical. And so that is, that is a way to think about how these plants, even though they're the same species of plants, they might not all have that same functioning. They might not have that same resistance to ozone or tolerance to it. So, I was going to ask Tim, if you could maybe put it back on a picture of ozone damage, instead of the no ozone damage. Yeah, and a question came up is, what are we going to do now that these are damaged? Is there anything we can do? Can we save this plant or is this plant doomed? Yeah, no, we can save the, we can help the plants. So there's a couple of things to think about in terms of the plants. So plants will grow new leaves. Like I showed you, Tim, maybe go to the one side before this, right before this, because I can illustrate this point potentially a little bit better. So if you look on the bottom here, you see that there are some leaves that look really bad but there are some leaves that are bright green and actually look healthy. So the plant keeps growing new leaves throughout the growing season. And so if we, even if plants look unhealthy, if we can stop our ozone pollution at a certain point, then that plant will be able to recover. Under most, throughout most of the United States, the ozone damage isn't going to kill the plant, it's just going to hurt the plant. You know, so with that, the plant is not growing as well, which has a lot of consequences for us, but it will survive. And so, you know, we can, the plants will survive, we can help them to grow better by reducing the amount of ozone that we have in our air. You know, what another great question was like, do the plants that have damage to the leaves get thinner? Or is that just an optical illusion? Well, what happens is what the ozone damage does is, you know how plants lose their leaves in the fall? A lot of these plants will stop growing and their leaves will fall off. Ozone damage speeds up that process and so it makes the plant drop the leaf a lot more quickly. And so that's part of the process. For some plants that might, I don't know how much, I don't think it really affects the thickness of the leaf very much, but they do start to look churgled and dry and papery. And it's very similar to when a plant loses its leaves in the fall, it just is happening, you know, this is happening in August, we do start to see the damage in July as well, here in Colorado, at least in Boulder, in Colorado. And somebody was wondering, does this happen quickly? Or, I mean, I know you've shown some dates on your pictures showing like between June and August or July and August. So to me that seems like it takes a couple months, or does it just take a couple minutes? Well, it depends on a lot of things like your ozone concentrations. And so in some places the ozone can damage the plant much more quickly than in other places if they have high ozone concentrations. When this is actually one of the questions that we're trying to answer, we're trying to figure out how quickly that ozone damage occurs and how much it relies or how much it depends on those ozone concentrations. And we know that ozone concentrations are really important. So you have, if you have more ozone, the plant is going to get damaged more, but we still don't have a good understanding of what the time scale is. It does seem like it's a couple of months. It can, if you have high enough ozone concentrations, it can happen in a few days, even. And so we have what are called ozone bio indicator gardens all over the country and we're starting to also have gardens internationally in a couple of places in Europe right now when we're working to grow them in other places. And at these gardens we have bio indicator plants and bio indicators just mean that they, the plants biologically indicate that our air is dirty. And so they function, if you've heard of the canary in the coal mine where the canary is telling the miners when the air is dangerous to breathe. That's kind of what these plants are doing out in our environment. They're biologically indicating that our air is dirty. And so we're planting these all across the country and we're actually asking citizen scientists like you to help us collect data at these gardens. Tim, I have another picture of just some citizen scientists. I think two slides down. Yep, collecting some data. So on the top photo you see that there's some people looking at the signs for our ozone garden at NCAR and on the bottom photo is a high school student who is helping me collect data on one of our cut leaf cone flowers in one of our gardens. You can see that there's a few other people in the garden also collecting data. And so what we're trying to do is to better understand when the ozone damage is evident on the leaf and how severe it gets. Most of that leaf is covered in ozone damage. And so what we really need to know is, when are you out there collecting this data for us? What day is it? Because that gives us an idea of how long that leaf has been exposed to ozone. And then how, how, how much damage is on each of those leaves. And so we categorize them on a scale of one to six, depending on the percentage of the leaf that is damaged by ozone. So that's, that's one way that you can help is if, if you have a garden that's near you, you can help us go look for that ozone damage on those bio indicator plants in that garden. You know, this is great. I have one or two really more question critical questions I think and then we should probably go to our kind of our ending thoughts but you know is there a place in America that's better or worse for ozone damage I thought that was a great question. Yep, yep. So Tim, if you can go to the next slide. So this is, this is a image of the United States and of ozone concentrations in the United States. And so I just want to highlight a few things in the US, the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency limits ground level ozone because it's toxic to humans just as toxic to plants, limit ozone at 70 parts per billion. And this is averaged over the course of eight hours. And so a per per billion is really small. It's one part of ozone per billion parts of water, or air, actually in this case, the reason that I say water is because I have an example that equates it to water. That concentration of 70 parts per billion is less than one cup of water in an Olympic sized swimming pool. So even tiny amounts of ozone are toxic. If you look at this graph, you see a lot of different colors and I want to highlight that anything that is yellow, orange, red, pink, all of those colors are, they don't comply with EPA standards and so you can see there's many, many places across the US where we have poor air quality that is not meeting the environmental protection agency's limits for ozone. The other thing that you can see on this graph is that the worst place for ozone is in California, unfortunately. And so that's, you can see all those pink and red dots, that means that the ozone concentrations are really high there. Some of the best places are places like Montana or North Dakota, where they have pretty low ozone concentrations. The other thing that I want to highlight is that, so the EPA limit for humans is 70 parts per billion. And while plants, some are more susceptible than others, we generally think of plants as being susceptible to ozone at 40 parts per billion of ozone. And so, you know, in most places anywhere that is light blue, green, yellow, orange, red, pink, any of those places, that's where plants can have this ozone damage and so that's almost everywhere in the country. You know, that's something that's coming up here is now, so does that affect our food? Yeah, of course, yeah, it does affect our food and you saw some of the photos of the potato and the snap bean. You saw what those leaves looked like earlier on. And, you know, Tim, maybe if you want to go back to some of those photos, slide three or slide four might be a good one to go back to. But yeah, the ozone is damaging the leaves of all of our plants so that it's also damaging the leaves of our crop plants. And in doing that, the plants have less energy to put into our food and so it is damaging our food and in fact in the United States, there have been studies that have shown that we are losing about $9 billion every year in food production loss due to this ground level ozone. You know, folks out there, we intended to go for 20 minutes or so with this presentation but your questions are so great so if you can stay, we're going to add a couple more questions and then we'll have Donica wrap up with some solutions, hopefully. But another great question came out about, is this going to affect all plants and in other words I think the question is, is which one of these plants are bio indicators or are all plants bio indicators. Not all plants are bio indicators but that does not mean that they're not affected. So there are some plants that are more sensitive to ozone than others. The least sensitive tend to have the highest amounts of antioxidants and so if you think of another type of antioxidant is actually vitamin C and so if you think of vitamin C and how much vitamin C is in different plants, that's a good indicator of which plants may or may not be as sensitive to ozone. Matt said, just because you don't see spots on the leaves of the plants does not mean that they're not going to be damaged by ozone. And even at high enough ozone concentrations, even the plants that are less, that are less sensitive and that are more resilient against this ozone pollution, even at really high concentrations, they will be affected. And basically what happens is, like I said, the ozone has to get inside the leaf and once it gets inside the leaf, if there's enough ozone inside the leaf, it can, it damages a lot of the enzymes and membranes that are in the leaf and it causes cells to die. And so that's part of what you're seeing on these plants. That's what makes them bio indicators. And so sometimes the cells might not die, but they might be, you know, taking that carbon dioxide and turning it into sugars, a lot less. And so you're not going to have as much, the plant is not going to be fixing its own food quite as much when it's exposed to ozone compared to when it's not. And so you can still have that damage without seeing the visible damage, the plants can still be damaged. So there are some plants that are bio indicators. This picture here is common milkweed. So that is one bio indicator plant, tall milkweed is another species of milkweed that's a bio indicator. We have a species of milkweed in Colorado that's called showing milkweed and that one isn't a bio indicator, but that doesn't mean that it's not hurt by the ozone. Cut leaf comb flower. That's another bio indicator plant that is often damaged by ozone. We have specific varieties of snap bean and potato in our gardens that are also sensitive to some soybean plants are sensitive to ozone. There's a quaking aspen can also be sensitive to ozone ponderous of pine. So there's a whole whole lot of plants that really can be quite sensitive to ozone and can act as bio indicators. In fact, the National Park Service I think has a list of not of ozone bio indicator plants. So you can always look at if you want to know more information on which ones are bio indicators. You know, and one other question I thought that was interesting is said, does this happen to things that don't have leaves like cactus? Well, we don't know that actually. It's, it's possible, but it's also cactus, they because they are in such dry regions, they tend to not open their. So those pores that allow the carbon dioxide to get in they open those at night and not during the day and at night because ozone needs sunlight to form. There's not as much ozone at night and so I think for that reason we haven't looked at it as much because we don't expect cacti to be quite as sensitive to ozone as some of these other plants. You don't know for sure it's entirely possible that they are it's just that nobody has ever studied it yet. So how long has this been a problem? Is this new or is this something that's been for all of growing history? Well, that's, that's another great question. It's, it's been a problem since the Industrial Revolution, I would say, and that it's, it's growing. It was really, really bad in the 1950s. And in fact, the ozone, ozone pollution has gotten much better over the, in the United States at least over the last 50 to 60 years. And that's because we have put restrictions into place to try and limit the amount of ozone. So the Clean Air Act is when they, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decided, you know, we really need to reduce the amount of ozone because it's toxic to people and it's actually, you know, for some people it can be toxic enough that it causes them to die. And that's not what we want. And so that's why they started putting restrictions in place. And in fact, our ozone nationally throughout the throughout all of the United States, ozone concentrations have decreased by 35%. So that's pretty good, but we still have a lot of work to do. Part of the reason why it's been since the Industrial Revolutions and really ramping up in the 1950s is because humans have put a lot more of those reactive nitrogen compounds and the volatile organic compounds that form ozone into the atmosphere. There is a natural level of ozone that is in the atmosphere in the ground level and that's closer to 10 parts per billion. And you see, you know, on this map here that in many places, you know, there's, there's, I don't know if I see any dots that are in that, that really dark, dark blue that zero to 30 parts per billion range. I don't think that there's anywhere that's really has that range of ozone in the United States at this point because everywhere has been affected by the emissions that has increased ozone. Thank you. And you know what, a great question again came up. And we're going to have to cut off questions here because we are about the top of the hour. But if you did eat a plant that had ozone damage, would that hurt you? No, because the ozone reacts really quickly, it's just not going to be as nutritious for you, but the ozone once it does the damage that means the ozone is gone because it's, it's, it's damaged something and it's reacted with it.  Okay. And another question that maybe Tim could go back to the EPA picture, somebody wanted to know what do the white areas mean if you don't have dots. You're good to go. Yeah, no, that does not mean that you're good to go it just means that we don't actually have data for that region, we only have data for the regions with the dots and so you can see that. The ozone monitors are actually really expensive, they can be $5,000 or more. And so it's not cheap to have them around and monitoring. And so, in a lot of places, ozone is only monitored in places where we have higher populations and so that's why you see a lot of monitoring along the West coast, in the eastern half of the United States. You can see in parts of the Rocky Mountains, but you know there's not as many people living in Nebraska, for example, and you can see that there's really only one or two points in Nebraska where ozone is being measured and similarly in Montana and in Idaho, you have a lot less people and a lot less ozone monitoring so it doesn't mean that you're good to go it just means that we don't actually know what those ozone concentrations are. Awesome. I think before we go to solutions which is going to answer several questions that have come up. One more question that's not about solutions is just that if we brought a damaged plant inside with that help. It might help a lot of times we have less ozone pollution inside there are other indoor air pollutants. And that's one thing to consider is the fact that there are other air pollutants, but the ozone concentrations inside tend to be not as high because we don't have that sunlight that's generating the ozone as much inside as we do outside. There are some exceptions like photocopiers actually produce a lot of ozone so if you're in a room with a photocopier maybe that's not the best. Also, and I highly recommend against using these but there are air purifiers that use ozone to purify air and that's because ozone kills things. If you're using one of those it's going to kill your plants please don't use those if you can I very much recommend against buying them do not buy those if you can help it. Great well let's have Tim shift to solutions because a lot of people want to know how can we limit ozone then how can we get rid of this stuff down at the ground level. Yeah, so um so there are individual actions that you can take and there are also larger national actions that need to be implemented and so there. There are things like we need to make sure that our factories are not are not emitting as many things and a lot of solutions actually are very similar to climate change solutions. Because the same things you know our vehicles in our industry that is releasing all the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are also releasing a lot of their reactive gases as well that form air pollution so air pollution and climate change are two different things. But at the same time they can be solved in similar ways. And so actions if you want to help reduce your impact things that you can do or you can drive less and use public transportation, you can not idle more than 30 seconds in your car.  And if you can use an electric or just the most fuel efficient car that you can. I would say ride your bikes more than then you know to and from places if you can do that that's similar to using public transportation and driving less. Other things that you might not realize is like I said sunlight is part of the product is part of what creates the ozone. And so if you're doing things with gas powered equipment like yard work when you're mowing your lawn. Or if you're doing other things that you remember how I said the smell of gasoline is a VOC. So if you refuel your car in the evening or you do your yard work in the evening that's also going to help reduce your impact on air pollution. And then there's also this step of choosing lower volatile organic compound or VOC paints carpets and other household products. So you can reduce your impact in those in some of those ways personally and then we can also just try and try and make sure that the federal government is also trying to limit emissions from some of those power plants and other places. So clean energy is really important. Driving less is really important. And then thinking about the time of day that you're doing these things is also an important step that you can take. That's great. Well folks I realize there's a lot of questions out there and I know we can't we could probably talk all day to Donica because she's got such great information. But Donica do you have anything to just maybe wrap up. No I want to I mean I guess what I would like to say is the fact that we are making progress. So it's not it's not an endless hopeless story we are making progress and we have to keep making progress so we have to keep cleaning up our actions to to reduce air pollution. And this will also help us combat climate change because if you think about the air pollution is hurting those plants and they're not taking as much carbon into their leaves that carbon dioxide is staying in the atmosphere and acting as a greenhouse gas and so reducing air pollution is going to be beneficial for both your health plants health and for our climate. So all of those things are really important. And I think that it's you know we we have worked so far on improving ozone concentrations and we can still do a lot more so I challenge all of you to keep trying to reduce your impact. Awesome. Well, you know, it's been really fun to explore the job of a global change ecologist like Donica. And we'd really like to thank Donica Loma does he for telling us a bit more about her work. Thanks to everybody for joining us today. It was an incredible chat. Thank you so much we tried to keep up the best we could. We'd like to learn more about what we talked about today or the weather or the atmosphere or about the sun or system science. Please visit our website. We have a collection of resources that are perfect for learning at home. And I'm also going to post that link into the chat box and you can also see over my head, the URLs for the information today that was useful that help people go to Donica's work. If you'd like to follow us, you can look at for more things like this on our Facebook page in the future, and we'll have additional virtual programming and other opportunities there in the near future. Mark, if you could just be sure that that's shared with everyone what you posted the link. Gotcha. I will share that with everyone I did not share that with everyone yet. Thank you. I was in the wrong thing. So siad.ucar.edu is our basic website. And if you go to that URL in the chat, you can get a whole bunch of information about what we do in our where we work at here in Boulder, Colorado. Thanks everyone. Thank everyone for coming. Have a great day. And we hope to see you again soon in another virtual program. Bye now.


So how exactly did George Floyd die? Could he have been saved? And what exactly does this preliminary autopsy report tell us, if anything? This is what I want to talk about in today's video. Now full disclosure, I'm a cardiologist, not a forensic pathologist, but I deal with patients with cardiopulmonary issues, cardiac arrest, respiratory problems pretty much on a daily basis. And we of course have this video that is very telling and gives us a lot of information. So the following is going to be my assessment and my opinion, which I think is shared by a lot of health care professionals. And I want to give you a doctor's perspective of what we know and what we can kind of infer based on the information that's out there. Not relaxed, not to breathe my face, not to breathe. So again, a lot of you have seen that video, very disturbing to watch, but also very important that it was captured. So what do we know based on this? Well, we know a lot. What we can see is George is in a prone position, meaning he's flat on his stomach, on the ground with his face flat against the pavement and a knee into his neck, applying pressure and force. What's exactly going on physiologically here? Well, there are two things that are compromised in this position. Breathing and circulation. First, let's talk about breathing. Now breathing involves filling our lungs with air, all right? And our lungs are obviously in our thorax. So in order for that to happen, the rib cage in the thorax has to be able to expand and that's accomplished because the diaphragm muscle contracts. It pulls down and as that happens, the chest wall will expand, allowing the lungs to fill with air. Similarly, our abdomen sort of gets pushed down a little bit in order for that to happen. Additionally, we have to be able to bring air through our mouth, our throat and down our trachea without much resistance to get that air into the lungs. Now when you're lying prone flat on the ground and you have resistance or a weight or a force pushing down on you, now you have to be able to lift your body up off the ground as you take in a breath. Now that can be more difficult for someone like George, who of course they call Big George because he was a big guy. So there's a lot more weight for him to be able to push up if he wants to take an adequate breath. Additionally, he has a knee on his neck. So that is applying force and pressure down. So not only has he pushed up against his own weight, he has to push up against the force of the officer, which can make things very difficult. Now additionally, when he has that knee on his neck, this could further compromise breathing by applying pressure against his trachea, which could compromise airflow coming in. Also, if you have other conditions like sleep apnea, this could further close up the airway in the back of the throat. Now we could potentially recreate a similar scenario by breathing through a straw. Take a straw and try to take some deep breath through it really fast. Again, it's very difficult, right? Now imagine breathing through a straw while you're down flat on the ground with your face against the pavement and a resistant force on your neck and try to do that for nine minutes. Now let's talk about what's going on physiologically in the body in a situation like this. First, let's talk about breathing. Breathing accomplishes two things. One is oxygenation. Two is ventilation. Now oxygenation is obviously the process of breathing air into our lungs to get oxygen into our blood in order for us to live. Ventilation is just as important. Ventilation is being able to get rid of CO2 or carbon dioxide that gets built up in the blood once the body consumes that oxygen during metabolism. Without ventilation, we cannot get rid of that carbon dioxide. And what happens is it causes the pH of the blood to go down. This causes a state of acidosis. So the body needs a balanced pH to function. If the body gets acidotic because it cannot get rid of all that carbon dioxide, then you're going to get an organ dysfunction. The heart is eventually not going to be able to function and electrical signals will fail and it'll cause cardiopulmonary arrest. Now let's talk about circulation. We talked about the breathing component of it, but there were also probably a circulation component. Now, as you saw in the video, the police officer's knee was against the neck forcefully for a long period of time. What can happen in this situation? Well, your carotid artery runs right along your neck. So compression to that air, the neck could compromise blood flow of the carotid artery up to the brain. Now another important fact is stimulation of the carotid body. The carotid body sits where the common carotid artery bifurcates into the internal carotid artery. Carotid body contains baroreceptors. Now these baroreceptors when stimulated can send impulses up to the brain, which in turn will send impulses down to the heart and the blood vessels to cause the heart rate to go really slow and the blood pressure to get really low. This can create a situation of further reduction in cardiac output in addition to the oxygenation and the ventilation issues we talked about. This is the same mechanism that sleeper holes or choke holes work on. Now add to all of this underlying conditions such as high blood pressure or coronary disease that we think George may have had. Obviously that creates a bad situation where his reserves to be able to tolerate something like that are worse than people without those health conditions. So it was the perfect storm of badness. So the other question is could George have been saved? We obviously watched this unfold sort of in real time and people were there when he passed out, police were there, EMS was there, no CPR was done. We all saw that but could have something have been done that could have potentially saved them. Well let's look at the timeline. From what we know by the videos about 825 is when he's thought to have lost consciousness, okay? Again the knee was on him for an additional almost three minutes after that. 827 is when EMS arrived and it wasn't until 830 he actually got on the ambulance. Now no CPR was done on the scene by the police officers which I think again is a big mistake. Which I think goes to show a deficiency in training of these officers. There were four officers there, clearly he had no pulse, he was not breathing. Immediate cardiopulmonary resuscitation should have been started, CPR should have been started, again that was not done. Now by the time the EMS arrives, it's unclear. Now at first I sort of criticized them for not getting on him immediately and starting CPR but one could argue either the police were instructing them not to do that at the scene or if they wanted to get him on the bus immediately and start resuscitation measures there. May not be unreasonable because when you started on the road you're eventually gonna have to get him up and get him into the bus. If that's what they were thinking they probably should have gotten them up under the gurney into the ambulance as fast as possible rather than the three minutes that it actually took because when you have a cardiac arrest patient every second counts.  In this situation it's unfortunate that there were trained police officers that did not start CPR immediately. Again it's hard to know if immediate CPR would really have changed the outcome for George but it at least would have given him a fighting chance. So in the end we have a witness cardiac arrest where the patient was out for at least six minutes. Again it was unclear at what point CPR was started in the ambulance but you know minimum six minutes which is a long time especially for somebody with underlying heart and other medical problems. Finally let's talk about this autopsy report. Now I know this was a preliminary report but these were still words in a statement put out by the medical examiner and these are words they're gonna have to stand by. Now first of all big picture the report doesn't really give a cause of death. Additionally it's very vague and it actually even makes assumptions to facts that we may not even know exist. The full report is pending but the statement they released reads the autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation. Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease. The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in the system likely contributed to his death. Now let's break this down line by line because this is important. First of all this was not traumatic asphyxiation nor was it strangulation, right? So strangulation when they're looking for signs of strangulation you're basically looking for signs of someone getting choked. So you're looking for ligature marks, you're looking for bruises and markings to show that someone's neck was forcefully compressed, fracture of the hyoid bone and other things you see like contractile and particular hemorrhages and signs of kind of acute obstruction of the airway. But we all looked at a video. He wasn't strangled, we know this. So that seems silly. Secondly traumatic asphyxiation. Again this was not traumatic asphyxiation. Traumatic asphyxiation refers to in a situation of trauma like a motor vehicle accident or machinery accident where there's trauma to the chest or there's some sort of situation where the patient literally cannot take a breath at all. What it causes is an acute increase in intratheurastic pressure which basically limits the backflow to the right side of the heart causing a spike in the right atrial pressure which transmits back up to the supervena cava which in turn causes an acute rise in venous pressure of the head and the face which will cause facial swelling. This will call a rupture of various veins and capillaries and other similar phenomenon that we see. But again we know in a situation this was not an acute trauma induced chest restriction situation. This was a slow asphyxiation process. What he had is something called positional asphyxiation. Positional asphyxiation is a situation where someone is not able to adequately breathe mechanically because of a certain position. You know in his case being prone on the ground and with a weight on the back of his head kind of like what we talked about before. And this process again can sometimes be a little drawn out and slower than your traumatic asphyxiation. But again, we don't need an autopsy to make that diagnosis. It was clear in the video. The last line which really bothered me reads the combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in the system likely contributed to his death. Now, you can't get much more vague than that. Likely and contributed. Already two words that sort of expressed uncertainty and any potential intoxicants like they didn't even do a tox report. They're just assuming that he may have been intoxicated or under the influence of something. I mean that line alone to me really compromises the integrity of this report combined with all this uncertainty and really it's a poor statement to put out and all it does is fuel the fire and I don't think they did anybody any good by releasing that paragraph. So again, a lot of holes in that in the terminology. I can't help to think that there is some bias involved in that preliminary report. What they should have just said is full report is pending. I'm really looking forward to the full autopsy. Hopefully there's details and I fully support an independent non-miniapolis associated medical examiner or pathologist doing an autopsy on him as well given the intensity of the situation and hopefully we can get some more answers soon. In the end, I think it's pretty clear we all know how he died. We don't need an autopsy to tell us that. It's semantics if you ask me. It's clear as day and something to be done about.