A gem of an activity

“Who wants to see if they are a Zombie?” asks Professor Carl Franck, causing all twelve Girl Scouts in the room to look up from their work and stare in bewilderment.  “Let’s go outside and see if you are really alive by using a TV satellite dish to measure your body heat!”  Still doubtful, a handful of girls get out of their seats and walk excitedly towards the door, following Professor Franck outside. The dish, which picks up microwave frequencies around 12GHz, will be used to measure the amount of thermal radiation being emitted from a girl standing in front of it against the cold sky. This amounts to a microwave thermometer test that allow the girls to see if their bodies radiate heat in the way that a Zombie’s cannot.  Happily, all the scouts who try pass this test and the program moves along without fear except that they now know that at least some of them are a source of microwave radiation.

>Read more on the CHESS website

Image: Betul Pamuk oversees two girl scouts soldering the taps to their coil.