#Periodic #GeniusGames #Chemistry #PeriodicTable #Atoms #Elements #STEM #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary In this episode we get elemental for the game Periodic, with the amazing Dr. Raychelle Burks as our special guest. We talk about why the table is arranged like it is, why some elements are weird, what the groupings mean, why we should love *all* subatomic particles, how isotopes help solve crimes, and how some people get viscious when playing Monopoly. So grab some dihydrogen monoxide and join us for Periodic, by Genius Games. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 02:52 - Molybdenum poisoning & glowing plants 12:39 - Basics of Periodic 19:14 - What is the Periodic Table? 32:35 - Why are some elements weird? 39:53 - Not just electrons 55:16 - Nitpick corner 1:00:37 - Final grades Links Periodic official site (Genius Games) Cattle molybdenum poisoning (Australian Veterinary Journal) Glowing succulents (Matter)  Glowing rubidium (Youtube; Royal Society of Chemistry) NIST periodic table  Dr. Raychelle Burk on Tiktok, and her Trace Analysis column Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:00  Jason, hello Jason  0:06  and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:12  Today, we're talking about periodic by genius games. Hello. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian Jason  0:20  this is Jason Brian  0:21  and we are joined by Dr Raychelle Burks, Raychelle, could you introduce yourself please? Raychelle  0:26   Yes, I am Raychelle Burks, I am a chemist and a forensic scientist.  Brian  0:32  Well, I'm so glad you're able to join us today. We were just talking about, let's see you said that your Instagram handle is radium, yttrium, and you'rr Dr. rubidium. And this is game is all about the periodic table. You use three different elements in your sort of social or media, like internet handles. So I think we got the right person for this. Raychelle  0:51  I hope so.  Jason  0:52  And just to give a bit more information to our listeners, you said you're at American University in Washington, DC, right? Raychelle  0:57  Yes, the and actually, it's funny, because it's like, it is American University. What a wild name for a school. We have a lot of universities, but it is one that's kind of got a congressional mandate. There was, you know, back in the day, they were like, we are going to have the American University. And it's like, it didn't quite work out, Brian  1:16  but that's interesting. So you said there's a congressional mandate. So this is kind of like, we're at the University of Georgia. We're a land grant institution, so we sort of have this mission that the university is supposed to satisfy you. You are in a similar situation. Raychelle  1:29  It's, well, it's weird, you know, I went to a land grant institution, so I'm a proud corn Husker. That's where I got my PhD. So University of Nebraska at Lincoln and so land grant institutions, definitely a bit different, right? Because you're taxpayer money, there's some property involved, and you have a mandate, you have an extension office. I believe you have a fantastic extension office. I think all state residents you know, have the ability to have, like, a library card and come to a university event, like there's a real community kind of based thing. And in a way, American actually also has that many universities do, especially for the neighborhood they're in. But American University is actually chartered by Congress, like, way back in the day, I think it's 1893 is this a pop quiz now? But so it's, it'

#Daybreak #CMYKGames #Climatechange #ClimateScience #BoardGames #ScienceCommunication #SciComm  Things are warming up in this episode as we talk with Dr. Jacquelyn Gill about Daybreak, a cooperative game about combatting climate change while keeping society intact. We cover tipping points, carbon drawdown, ocean acidification, the clean energy transition, what fossil fuels actually are, and some actually good news about climate change. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 01:31 - Baby pterosaurs and frog saunas 06:11 - Playing Daybreak 22:53 - Designer choices 27:50 - Sense of urgency 32:45 - Tipping points 40:44 - Ocean acidification 47:05 - Clean energy as the focus 52:53 - RCP and climate projections 58:50 - What are fossil fuels? 1:02:00 - Niggling nitpicks 1:07:12 - Final grades Links Daybreak Official Site (CYMK Games) Designer diary FSC Certification (sustainable components) Matteo Menapace site  Warm Regards (Jacquelyn's podcast)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:11  Today, we're going to discuss Daybreak by CMYK. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian.  Jason  0:20  This is Jason Brian  0:21  and we're joined today by a special guest, Jacquelyn Gill. Jacquelyn, can you please introduce yourself? Jacquelyn  0:26  Hi, I'm Jacquelyn. I'm a paleoecologist from the University of Maine, and I am also a science communicator, and I focus on climate change. Brian  0:34  That's cool. And then you also said that you are, in fact, a board gamer yourself. What games do you enjoy playing? Jacquelyn  0:41  Oh gosh, I have been a gamer of many stripes for a long time, everything from video games to tabletop RPGs to board games. And these days, I've been getting really into two player games because we haven't really found our gaming community. So I get really excited when I have a new two player game, and I think my husband's just going to be really excited to play daybreak, because we've been playing a lot of twilight struggle, which is a cold war game where one of you plays the Soviet Union and the other plays the United States.  Brian  1:14  Oh, man.  Jacquelyn  1:14  And you know, that's starting to feel a little too close to home these days. So yeah, and it also takes a million years to get through.  Brian  1:21  Well, I don't think this game takes a million years to get through, but I would say that this is not a light game either from that perspective. But you know, you can when you win. Man, does it feel good, though. Before we get into the game, we'll do our science banter, some kind of story or topic or something from the world of science that we want to discuss. We usually let the guest host go first. Jacquelyn, do you have something you like to share? Jacquelyn  1:42  I do. And, you know, the folks might have seen those T shirts or mugs that have a dinosaur on them that say all my friends are dead. As a paleoecologist, I feel this, you know, this is my life. So this is not a this is not a happy story. You know, when we talk about a highly productive fossil site, we're talking about a death trap. So, I mean, on September 5, there was this really cool study that came out in the journal Current Biology, and it's all about baby pterosaurs. So these were these, yeah, these  Brian  2:13  dead baby pterosaurs.  Jacquelyn  2:14  Dead baby pterosaurs. I know, and we know. So the fossils themselves are, I would classify them as cute. They're pretty small and but it turns out that this, this p

#genetics #genotype #GeniusGames #mendel #peas #BoardGames #Science This month we're talking about Genotype, by Genius Games, where you get to play a field assistant to the father of modern genetic, Gregor Mendel. We'll talk about who Mendel was, why his peas were so important to biology, how he got a bit lucky, and how many different ways there are to break a gene. (Also, why it's weird that some humans can drink milk as adults, and why cats and borrowed board games don't mix.) Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:30 New paper on Mendel's Peas 04:46 Overview of Genotype Game 08:16 The Meatball Incident 13:45 Who was Gregor Mendel? 16:08 The seven pea genes 20:36 How to break a gene 27:47 The Modern Synthesis of biology 31:04 Dominant and recessive genes 38:22 Mendelian genes in humans 44:59 Nitpick corner 48:40 Final grades Links Genotype (Genius Games) Massive study of Mendel's pea genes (Nature) Hankweed: Mendel's unfortunate second choice for plants to study (PubMed Central) Evolution of human lactase persistence (=drinking milk as adults) (Nature Genetics)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:01  Brian. Brian  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:13  Today, we will be talking about Genotype by genius games. Brian  0:19  Hey, I'm Brian, and I am joined by a very special guest today, an expert in plant genetics. Jason Wallace, yay! Jason  0:26  Hey everyone. So I know you already know who I am, but this is, like, today's topic is what I do for my bread and butter. This is my research area. So we figured we'd run with this. It's been a while since it's been just us for a full episode. So Brian  0:38  yeah, it has. This is gonna be, this is gonna be harder work than we normally have to do, but, you know, but you are the expert today, so you are going to talk about it, and I'm going to be here to ping you with questions, Speaker 1  0:47  yeah, which means I probably should give a little bit of background, because I'm not sure I've ever done that. So we're both researchers at the University of Georgia, both associate professors. My background is in genetics and molecular biology and informatics, which basically means studying very small things and how they get passed down from organism to organism in bacteria and now plants. And my specific area, which we may talk about later, is quantitative genetics, which is complex traits, but not actually the very simple traits, like we're going to talk about with Mendel's peas for today in the game genotype, but traits that are controlled by many, many, many genes and that have more complex interactions.  Brian  1:28  Cool, cool, cool, cool.  Jason  1:30  Let's go ahead and start off with a fun science fact. And Brian, I'm going to throw this to you, because I'm going to be talking a lot this episode Brian  1:35  Yeah. I mean, totally, totally fine. There was a paper published recently in Nature, where they described and identified the genes responsible for the last three of Mendel's seven traits. So could not be more appropriate for this game. Four of the genes were known, so Mendel studied seven different traits. Jason  1:54  We'll talk about that later, and we'll probably talk about this paper a lot later. Yeah, Brian  1:59  we probably will. Honestly, I'm hoping you can explain it to me, because I study bacterial genetics, and it's way easier than plant genetics, but basically, the four of the genes had been described previously, three of them had not. And this study was a massive genome sequencin

#Atiwa #Bats #UweRosenberg #LookoutGames #Extension #Outreach #SciComm #BoardGames #Science Overview It's time for bats! In this episode, we talk about Atiwa, a worker-placement game by Uwe Rosenberg based on a specific scientific study showing how fruit bats provide enormous ecological benefit to communities in Ghana. We're also joined by Mariëlle van Toor, one of the researchers involved in that exact study, to help explain why this whole thing is so important. So grab some fruit, settle into your favorite roost, and let's talk about Atiwa. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 01:30 Humans and honeyguides 05:55 Bats avoiding collisions during rush-hour 09:43 Atiwa gameplay 21:12 The study behind Atiwa 26:58 What is that fruit? 31:44 Uwe Rosenberg does great outreach 35:25 Exosystem services 39:48 More bat facts! 42:10 Nitpick corner 45:58 Final grades Links Atiwa (Lookout Games) Original study by Mariëlle van Toor et. al. (Current Biology) Video abstract for the above (Youtube) Press release for the above, with photo by Christian Ziegler (Max Planck) Straw-colored fruit bat eating a banana (Youtube) Paper on honeyguides working with humans (Science) Paper on convergent evolution of hearing genes in bats and whales (PubMed Central) The Eidolon monitoring network Tautonym - When genus and species have the same name (Wikipedia) Sugar plum tree (Upaca kirkiana) (iNaturalist) Research article on the New York Land Acquisition Program to limit pollution to New York City (Pace Environmental Law Review)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Unknown Speaker  0:00  Brian, hello Jason  0:06  and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:10  Today, we're going to discuss a T wop by lookout games. All right, hello. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian.  Jason  0:21  This is Jason,  Marielle  0:22  and this is Marielle. And I'm a researcher at Linnaeus University in southeast Sweden, and I mostly work on combinational movement ecology, and especially looking into the role of animal movement for the spread of pathogens. And sometimes I also look into dispersion of seeds by animals. So this is what is relevant for the game today. Brian  0:42  Very much, and we're extremely excited to have Marielle van Toor here. This is a unique example of a science game for us. This game was explicitly inspired by a study that was published by Marielle and Dina Dechmann in it wasn't even that long ago when was the study published? Marielle  0:58   2019  Brian  0:58  in 2019 so that's relatively recent in Current Biology, which is a is a very bright and shiny journal. So very excited to be able to make this arrangement here to talk about a Atiwa and sort of environmental activism, scientific environmental activism and ecological services and bats and Ghana, okay, but before we get into that, we usually start with some kind of a science banter, science fact, Jason, you are up this time. Marielle, I think you said you might have something as well. So usually we give the guest host first dibs. So do you want to share us something with us?  Marielle  1:30  SoI have one thing that I think is really cool, and that is in some way related to the game, even though it's on a completely different system, but also located in Africa. So there's a researcher whose name is Claire Spottiswoode, and she works in South Africa, and she's been working on a system of mutualism, and that means interactions that are mutual or beneficial to both partners between humans and birds. And this is particularly the

#Harmonies #PlanetGame #Ecology #NichePartitioning #BoardGames #Science We have a short bonus episode today, going over two science-inspired games, Harmonies and Planet. Both of these games touch on ecology and what animals need in their environment, but in a very science-light manner. We talk about niche partitioning, compare and contrast the games, and even have a cool science fact about trees using lightning to kill their neighbors. Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 01:06 Trees weaponizing lightning 03:54 Harmonies overview 08:31 Planet overview 12:25 Compare and contrast 17:24 Humans and vertebrate bias 19:39 Niche specialization 22:53 No science grades 24:18 Fun grades Links Harmonies official site (Libellud) Planet official site (Blue Orange Games) Tonka bean trees survive lightning (LiveScience.com) Interview with Harmonies creator (Youtube, French) Translated and cleaned transcript Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Brian  0:05  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:11  In today's bonus episode, we're going to discuss harmonies by Libellud Jason  0:15  and planet by blue, orange games.  Brian  0:18  hey, I'm Brian.  Jason  0:19  This is Jason. Brian  0:20  It's just the two of us. Welcome to a bonus episode anyway. So we're supposed to take a break midway through the season, and we have this is  gonna be a bonus episode. It's gonna be a little weird. We're talking about two games today, harmonies and planet. These games are similar. I've decided that these games are, instead of being based on a true story, they're inspired by a true story. Both of these have a strong nature theme, but it you know, they weren't really trying to directly model anything in science. They just sort of did it by accident.  Jason  0:52  and they're both completely coincidentally French, Brian  0:56  and have a lot of other similarities too, in terms of overall mechanics and also having some some fun gimmicks associated with them, you actually have a science fact. So, you know, it's a bonus episode, but what's your science fact?  Jason  1:08  This was some research that came out about trees in the Panama rainforest. Relevant, because this is all about ecology and plants competing well. So it turns out that tall trees in the rainforest get struck by lightning a lot, and it's actually thought to be one of the major contributors to tree mortality, to killing the tall trees and then opening up space. Well, turns out there's this one species of tree called a tonka bean tree, that apparently just survives lightning unscathed.  Brian  1:35  What?  Jason  1:36  but lightning strikes kill all of the parasitic vines on it, or most of them, and a lot of it's nearby competitors, and so it may actually be using the lightning strikes as a way of gaining a competitive advantage. They did research over time, looking at looking exactly where lightning struck, looking at the trees before and after, looking at long historical records. And apparently, for other trees, being next to a tonka bean tree is actually a very high risk for mortality. You are likely to die next to one of them, presumably because getting struck by lightning and kind of using that to kill you. Brian  2:06  This is the strangest thing to imagine, having a selective advantage. This is so bizarre.  Brian  2:06  Well, think about it, though, like lightning generally strikes the tallest thing, and in a rainforest, it's always a game of trying to reach the light, and so lots of trees are benefited from getting really tall

#PlanetX #PlanetaryScience #ExtrasolarPlanets #SolarSystemEvolution  #Telescopes #Observatories #ScienceGames #BoardGames #Science Overview We're going back into space this episode with The Search for Planet X, by Foxtrot Games and Renegade Game Studios. Join us with our guest, Addie Dove, planetary scientist and co-host of the Walkabout the Galaxy podcast, as we search for the mysterious Planet X while juggling the issues of scheduling telescope time, publishing papers, and attending conferences.  Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 03:02 - Space smells and asteroid threats 07:28 - Game overview 16:46 - What is Planet X? 20:22 - Hunting for things in our solar system 27:14 - What do we learn from planetary science? 31:56 - Extrasolar planets 38:03 - Logic rules and real bodies 43:39 - In-game publishing & real-world controveries 47:18 - Nitpick corner 50:17 - Final grades 55:49 - Wrap-up Links The Search for Planet X (Renegade Game Studios)Walkabout the Galaxy Podcast Article on Planet X history (The Planetary Society) Citronaut Dave (Addy's instagram) Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Unknown Speaker  0:00  Music. Brian  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:11  Today, we'll be talking about the search for Planet X by Fox Trot games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason,  Brian  0:20  this is Brian, Addie  0:22  and I'm Addie Dove.  Jason  0:23  All right, we have the inestimable, incorrigible Addie Dove, who told us just before recording, that she comes from the best podcast walk about the galaxy. Addie  0:33  I have the shirt on today too. Brian  0:35  Oh, cool,  Jason  0:36  which, sorry, listeners. We can't show you that. It's an audio podcast. You can look it up. I'm sure they have it for sale somewhere. Anyway, Addie, can you introduce yourself to our audience, let them know who you are and why you're on the show about finding Planet X. Addie  0:48  Happy to Yeah, hi. I'm Addie Dove. I'm a planetary scientist and physicist at the University of Central Florida. So My day job is that I do research understanding planetary surfaces. I study dust in space, so dust, specifically on the moon and asteroids, and how it behaves and how we understand it. I'm involved in a number of experimental projects and missions, and my favorite part about my research is that I've done things on on orbital assets, so on the ISS, on cube sats and on the vomit comet. So I've actually flown on the parabolic airplane flights.  Jason  1:25  Fun or, well, I don't know I've heard about the vomit comet, maybe not so fun, but it's fun.  Addie  1:31  I love it so much.  Jason  1:32  So you are an astro quark. That's what the host of the walk about the Galaxy podcast call themselves.  Addie  1:36  Yes, it is.  Brian  1:38  Yes. Are you bottom quark or charm? You are. Charm. Quark, Jason was right, He's right, Addie  1:45  Yeah. So we have strange and charm, and then we also have bottom. And lately, our newest Astro quark is down. So this is a, this is a clever name that we have because we're mostly astronomy folks, and it's astronomy podcast, and quarks are sort of like the fundamental units, right, of matter. And so there's strange charm, top bottom or truth and beauty, if you like those names a little bit better, instead of top and bottom, and then up and down. Brian  2:11  Truth and beauty are substitutes for which ones then? Addie  2:14  top and bottom.  Jason  2:15  Yeah, same initials, but more poetic, yes.  Okay, one of our quark

#Undergrove #AEGGames #mushrooms #fungi #mycorrhizae #mothertree #BoardGames #Science Summary Join us for a trip belowground as we explore Undergrove, a game about mushrooms and nutrient networks by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootten. We cover some basics of fungal biology, how and why these fungi form partnerships with trees, and the controversial idea of a "mother tree" selectively nourishing its seedlings through these networks. Timestamps 00:20 Introductions 02:33 Killer vines and efficient fungi 07:20 Game overview 17:30 What are fungi? 20:56 Different types of mycorrhizae 27:48 Nutrient exchange 30:45 The mother tree controversy 41:32 Nitpick corner 45:57 Grades 56:09 Avatar inspiration 58:04 Final thoughts Links Undergrove (Official Site) Lovevine parasitizing wasp galls (Current Biology) And Youtube video Massive mycorrhizae network experiment  (Nature) Ze Frank does slime molds (Youtube)  Finding The Mother Tree (Wikipedia) Suzanne Simard's TED talk (TED.com)  Point-by-point rebuttal (UCD Dublin; requires submitting information)  Another rebuttal (Scientific American)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net    This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:05  Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.  Brian  0:11  Today we're going to discuss Undergrove by AEG. Hey, how's it going? Welcome back to Gaming with Science. I'm Brian.  Jason  0:23  This is Jason Anny  0:24  And I'm Anny. Brian  0:25  Anny, how's it going? We've been talking about trying to get you on literally forever, and we finally found a good game to do it. Can you introduce yourself?  Anny  0:32  Yeah. My name is Anny Chung. I'm an associate professor in Plant Biology and Plant Pathology at the University of Georgia, I would classify myself as an ecologist. And what I usually am interested in is the ecology of plants and microbes that interact with plants, usually below ground, which is very appropriate for this game.  Brian  0:54  Anny's a fancy professor. She has an endowment. She's the Haynes. What is it? The Haynes professor for underground ecology, or below ground ecology.  Anny  1:02  It's very specific. I stumbled into it. But the, I think the full title is The Haynes Endowed Professor for below-ground botany, so specifically only below ground. Yeah, I don't get to do anything above ground. Brian  1:19  You have a counterpart who does the above ground stuff Anny  1:21  I do have a counterpart, Megan de Marsh, who is the above ground botany person. Brian  1:28  anyway. Well, your research is really cool, and I'm really glad to have you on. I know that you've said that you are not a card carrying mycologist, but I also know that you study fungi a lot more than most people that I know. For someone who is not a card carrying mycologist, I know it's a big part of your work. Speaker 1  1:42  Yeah, and that is right, in terms of the microbes that we do study below ground. My lab focuses on fungi, quite a lot more than we do bacteria. But yeah, I think the reason I say that I'm not a card carrying mycologist is that, that was never a part of my formal training, as I was doing my degrees coming into this position, but a lot of our work does involve fungi, and I do like them a lot.  Brian  2:07  Well, that's fine, Jason and I like bacteria, but you're still allowed anyway. Okay, so before we get into talking about Undergrove, and I am very excited to talk about it, because this is, this might be a spicy conversation. I did a little bit more research on this, and this is, there's some controversy here. Controversy can lead to fu

#Computation #TuringMachine #AlanTuring #Logic #DeductionGames #BoardGames #Science #Math #STEM Summary Today we cover Turing Machine, a pure logic and deduction game where you use punchcards to identify the hidden code. We're joined by the inestimable Stephen Granade, grand high guru of the DragonCon Science Track, to help us understand who Alan Turing was, what a computer is, and how its logic works, plus cool facts about lasers and stuff.  Timestamps 0:00 - Introduction 2:11 - Laser cooling, plate tectonics, and DNA data storage 9:39 - Turing Machine game overview 18:37 - The magic behind the punchcards 23:15 - Who was Alan Turing and his machine? 32:54 - Data storage and punchcards 40:59 - Boolean math & quantum computing 46:06 - Nitpicks and final grades 54:38 - Final thoughts Links Official Game Site (TuringMachine.info) DNA for data storage (Harvard Magazine) Laser cooling (Wikipedia) Homologous recombination (Wikipedia) Fully synthetic genome (J Craig Venter Institute) Episode on Evolution  Turing Machine Designer Diary (Board Game Geek) How Dobble/Spot It works (Youtube) Running Minecraft as a computer Running Magic the Gathering as a computer Half-adder algorithm (Youtube) (note: still quite technical) Science vs Movies at Dragoncon video 1 and video 2 (Youtube) Gettysburg game (Board Game Geek)   Other stuff Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/  ) Stephen  0:00  Music. Brian  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:11  Today, we'll be talking about Turing Machine by Scorpion Masque. All right. Welcome back. Everyone to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian. And today we have very special guest Stephen Granade. Stephen we know from science track at Dragon Con, which I think people have heard us talk about before. He is the lead guru and ring master of the science track, and manages to keep all the things running and fight for our space and make sure we have the resources we need. So we are very grateful to him.  Brian  0:41  The Grand Poobah. Stephen  0:42  You make me sound so organized. Jason  0:45  All you need is the illusion of organization, and you're fine.  Stephen  0:49  That's right,  Jason  0:49  anyway. But if you can kind of introduce yourself to the guest, what's your background? What's your what's your story? Stephen  0:54  So my background is that I spent my undergraduate years at a small liberal arts college as a member of the major of the Month Club. But as my chemistry professor said, I never dropped any of the majors. So after cramming four years into five, I had a Bachelor of Science, dual major, physics, chemistry, and then a bachelor of arts, theater arts, with a math minor. And I looked around at the options there and decided, you know, where the real business is. That's physics. Why I went to graduate school in physics. I studied atomic cooling and trapping, where we would use lasers to cool down atoms to ultra cold temperatures to the point where they started to act in concert. And you would get a basically a quantum super fluid, if you've ever heard of like liquid helium, where you cool it down enough that it doesn't have friction or things like that. We were doing that, but with dilute gasses of atoms. So also, again, just a great career decision. Lots of people wanting to cool atoms down a lot, but fortunately, it also involved lasers and optics. So I moved into working for companies doing sensors and image processing, which of course, turned into machine learning. So I just have this mishmash of

#Microbiome #GutCheck #SciComm #Dysbiosis #Antibiotics #Probiotics #GameDesign #BoardGames #Science  Overview In this episode we talk with Dr. David Coil, microbiome scientist and the creator of Gut Check. We talk about microbiome health, antibioics, probiotics, prebiotics, game design considerations, and how the game's origin includes cheerleaders and the International Space Station.  Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 1:17 Microbiome body odor & sweat 4:47 Gut Check overview 10:45 Microbiome science 17:02 Antibiotics and phage therapy 23:05 Prebiotics and Probiotics 26:59 Game history & design 41:52 Giving the game away 47:01 Grades & final thoughts Links Gut Check print-and-play website and FAQ (microbe.net), plus  scientific paper (PLoS Biology) Microbes make your body odor (Scientific Reports) The Joy of Sweat (book; Goodreads) Bacteriophage (Wikipedia) Jason's "Mighty Microbes" cards (by Zymo) The Landlord's Game (Wikipedia)  Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/) Brian  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:12  Today, we'll be talking about gut check published by Qiagen. All right. Welcome back, everyone. This is Jason.  Brian  0:20  This is Brian,  Jason  0:21  and we have another special guest on today, Dr David Coil. David, would you please introduce yourself? David  0:26  Hi. Thank you guys so much for having me on the show. My name is David Coil. Right now. I'm the program manager for a National Science Foundation funded center on pandemic Insights, where we study what we call the pre emergence phase of pandemics, which is viruses circulating in animals that might jump to people and cause problems. Brian  0:45  Very cool. Maybe we should have had you on the other game. We didn't know. Jason  0:48  Hey, we can't have everyone on the pandemic episode. We have to spread them around. I'm sure there will be other disease related games we can go over.  Brian  0:55  Yeah, probably  Jason  0:56  anyway. So David, we wanted to get on here. Because not only is he an avid gamer and scientist, he's actually the chief creator of gut check, which we're going to be going over today.  Brian  1:07  Yay.  Jason  1:08  This is less going to be an interview. We mostly want to talk the science, but we do want to get some insights from you about the making of the game, the things involved in that. But mostly we want to talk about microbiome science before we get to that, though, we would like to start off with some cool science fact. As our guests, we give you the first choice. If you have some cool science fact you've learned lately, you can share it. Otherwise, I'm sure Brian has something to share. David  1:27  It's funny, I actually tried to think of something. But in the spaces I work in, all of my science facts are depressing for a fun I mean, Brian  1:37  we just did a paleontology game. And you know, they always point out that the best Paleontology is founded by tragedy, so  David  1:45  fair enough. Brian  1:46   Uh, well, I did find something. And maybe this is not depressing, but possibly entertaining. I usually try to theme them. So this is the microbiome of underarm odor.  Jason  1:57  This sounds like it's heading for an ignobel Brian  2:00  No, not at all that you would be amazed at how many studies there are. I don't know. I maybe you wouldn't. I'm not sure. Okay, so underarm odor is not produced by your underarm. It is produced by the breakdown of things that come out of your apocrine glands, by the microbes that live in your underarm. T

#Holotype #Programming #GameDesign #Python #BoardGames #Science Summary A follow-up to our last episode, in this episode we interview Brett Harrison, one of the co-creators of Holotype. Specifically, Brett is the one who programmed a computer to play Holotype against itself 10,000 times per minute in order to precisely balance the point values of different parts of the game. In this interview we'll cover a bit of the background behind Holotype, why he did that sort of optimization Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 02:13 - Design of Holotype 03:54 - Playtesting and computer simulation 11:37 - Designing the right AIs 14:50 - What parts got tweaked 18:35 - Game length, Bone Wars, and an app 21:20 - Lost mechanics, accuracy, and personal favorites 25:15 - Closing remarks Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Links Brexwerx Games: https://www.brexwerxgames.com/ This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/  )   Brian  0:06  hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:12  Today, we'll be interviewing Brett Harrison from Brexwerx Games. All right, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason.  Brian  0:22  This is Brian,  Jason  0:23  and today we have another special guest. This is Brett Harrison from Brexwerx Games. Brett, can you introduce yourself? Brett  0:29  Hi, yeah. Brett Harrison, Brexwerx Games, one of the designers on holotype, which is our board game about paleontology, Jason  0:35  yes. And when this episode drops, about two weeks before we will just put out our episode on holotype itself, we we're talking with some paleontologists, but this was because I wanted to ask some more about what you did for the game. So our listeners are already familiar with the game itself, how it plays the science in it, but I wanted to really follow up with an aspect I learned about when I was doing research for that episode about you created a computer simulation to basically play test the game, and we'll get to that in a moment, but I think we need to learn a little bit more about you first. So can you give us, like, what's your background? Like, how did you get into making board games, paleontology, that sort of thing?  Brett  1:13  Yeah. So I've always been into paleontology since I was a little boy. My grandfather brought me a book from the Los Angeles library, which I still have, so it's incredibly overdue, but it was all about dinosaurs, so he would read it to me when I was like six, and that's how I kind of got hooked on it. And then I eventually went to college for computer science and needing to get electives and stuff, I always chose paleontology or geology and stuff like that. So that's where I get that background always been a gamer since really young, started out with like, axis and allies, and went all up to all the Euros and everything else that's out there. So really big into board gaming. I've designed games, computer games and board games in the past, but nothing of this nature until COVID hit, and me and my buddy were like, Let's make a board game. So that's when we started working on holotype. And the theme was dinosaurs from the beginning, because I was so into paleontology, but we also want to make it super scientifically, you know, as accurate as possible within something that's supposed to be a fun game mechanic Brian  2:11   That was really obvious. So we played with a couple of paleontologists for our episode on holotype. They really appreciated the attention to detail, and so do I, because I think it's really important for a science game that, like, accuracy, at least, is you can never h

#Holotype #BrexwerxGames #CommonDescentPodcast #Dinosaurs #Paleontology #BoardGames #Science Summary Break out your pick and hand brush because in this episode we discuss "Holotype" by Brexwerx Games, and are joined by the wonderful Will and David from the Common Descent podcast. This isn't just another game about dinosaurs; it's a game about the people who dig them up, clean them off, hit the library and museum to cross-check them, and finally publish the coveted holotype to ensconce a new dinosaur (or marine reptile or pterosaur) in the annals of science. This was a great game chock full of scientific meat (and bones?), so come with us into the world of paleontology with Holotype. Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction 01:26 - Borealopelta 03:59 - Dinosaur vomit, poo, and pee 07:42 - Game introduction & mechanics 14:47 - What is a holotype? 19:15 - Gameplay & strategic depth 22:27 - Scientific accuracy 32:06 - Public & private goals 36:07 - Dinosaur (& other) groupings 44:06 - Trace fossils 48:09 - Nitpick corner 53:33 - Final grades Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Links Holotype (Brexwerx Games): https://www.brexwerxgames.com/products/holotype-mesozoic-north-america Common Descent Podcast: https://commondescentpodcast.com/ Dinosaur bromolites study (Nature): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03889-y Borealopelta (well-preserved ankylosaur) (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borealopelta This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ ) Jason  0:00  Brian, hello and welcome to the Gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:11  Today, we're going to discuss Holotype by Brexwerx Games. Hey, this is Brian Jason  0:21  This is Jason, Will  0:22  this is Will. David  0:23  This is David Brian  0:24  Will, and David, David and will. David  0:26  That's us. We're new.  Brian  0:28  Where are you guys from? David  0:29  We are the hosts of Common Descent, a podcast about paleontology, Earth history, evolution. We are also fellow Dragon Con science track folks, yeah, and we do a lot of science communication and stuff. We are both paleontologists.  Brian  0:44  So I asked for the benefit of the listeners, I know who you guys are very well, because I've been a listener of Common Descent, not since the beginning, but for a very long time. Very, very excited to have you here. In fact, when I first saw the game holotype that we're going to be talking about today, it immediately sparked in my mind "I wonder if I can get Will and David to come and guest on our podcast, if I get this game", and it happened, and it's awesome, the stars Jason  1:10  The Starshave aligned. Will  1:11  Yes. David  1:12  we actually played at the at the museum, yeah, which was, which was very fun,  Will  1:16  very fitting. Brian  1:16  No dinosaurs and gray, of course.  David  1:18  No. Well, we have some birds. We've got about a dozen different types of birds. Brian  1:24  But anyway, why don't we do our little science banter? At first, is there some interesting bit of science to learn about, or would like to talk about? Will  1:31   Absolutely, the one that's fresh on my mind, which is a study on the specimen of borealopelta, which is a ridiculously well preserved ankylosaur, or nothosaur, specifically armored dinosaur. It's 3d preserved stomach content, skin pigment, one of the, if not the best preserved dinosaur we've ever found. This study was looking at the fact that the keratin, the horny material on the armor, is also preserved, and we've never gotten that before. So they were looking at what is the actual status and state of

#Academia #Publications #Satire #PublishOrPerish #BoardGames #Science Introduction Merry early Christmas, as we go through a short bonus episode on Publish or Perish, a satirical card game by Dr. Max Bai. We talk about the nature of academic publishing, including problematic aspects like predatory journals, and how some of the quirkier aspects of the process get reflected in the game. So enjoy this lighter offering, and we'll see you with Season 2 in 2025! Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction 01:53 - The Importance of Publications 05:06 - Gameplay and Mechanics 12:15 - Grades (& more Importance of Publication) 15:52 - Generative AI & Predatory Journals 21:26 - Wrap-up Links Publish or Perish (Kickstarter page)    This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Brian  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. In this bonus episode, we're going to discuss publish or perish by Dr Max Bai Jason  0:20  All right, everyone, welcome back. We're well, Brian says that this one is actually science with gaming instead of gaming with science as we're doing a game about the scientific process itself instead of about a science topic. This is Jason. This is Brian. And welcome technically, we're in our between season break right now, but we like giving y'all bonus episodes, and honestly, this was something we couldn't pass up. So we're just going to dive right into it. Publish or Perish, is a game that is just out by Dr Max Bai. So he is an independent social psychologist. So he got his PhD in social psychology, did a postdoc at Stanford, and now runs an independent research lab, which I don't know exactly how that works. He says on his Kickstarter page he started a few companies, so I assume they provide him enough income he can just do his own research what he wants. And maybe social research is less expensive than biology research. I don't know. I do not have enough money to be an independent researcher and run my own lab. Brian  1:07  Well I mean, research can vary widely in how expensive or inexpensive it is, depending on how you're doing it. Jason  1:13  but whatever the case is, he's running an independent research lab, which means he doesn't have any of the administrative overhead and all the deans and stuff that we spend all our time complaining about, and that's probably a preview for how this episode is going to go, because this episode is about the scientific process itself, not really about any specific scientific discipline. And so you're going to see maybe a peek behind the curtains, if you don't know it already, if you're already in the sciences, then hopefully this is not too traumatizing, as we bring up maybe some of the less fun parts of being a researcher and a scientist. So anyway, what is this game? I don't know if he made this as a graduate student or as a postdoc. It is a light party game meant to kind of poke fun at the scientific publishing enterprise. So we've mentioned this a few times on the episode. We scientists don't have very much. We're generally not in it for the money. Most of us don't get very famous like the one thing we have is our reputation with other scientists, and we establish that by publishing academic research papers. And people look at those papers, and that's how things like promotion and tenure, which is basically job security and being hired by another university or going off into industry is important, like if you're going on the job market either as a freshly minted Master's or PhD student, or as a professor who's been in it for 20 years, people are going to look at your publication record to see, are you actually a good scientist? Are you actually putting out a lot of work, and hopef

#Pandemic #Epidemiology #PublicHealth #Disease #COVID #BoardGames #ZManGames #Science #SciComm Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Overview In this month's episode we're covering "Pandemic" by Z-Man Games, where you play public health workers trying to save the world from four diseases at the same time. We're joined by Drs. Yann Boucher and Anna Szuecs to help us talk about what a pandemic is, how diseases spread, how COVID-19 compares to both historical pandemics and the ones in the game, whether masks and vaccinations actually work, and a host of other topics. So grab your mask, sit six feet apart, and join us to learn how you, too, can help save the world from microbial apocalypse! Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 00:55 - Fun science facts 04:57 - Game overview 09:47 - Real-world pandemics 13:52 - Epidemiology and spread of diseases 25:56 - Historical pandemics and lessons learned 30:52 - COVID-19 and mental health 33:36 - Future pandemics and disease surveillance 40:37 - Final grades Links Pandemic (Z-Man Games) Climate change makes diseases worse (full article and summary article) Scientist interview from The Last of Us (YouTube) What if Fungi Win? (book) This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Anna  0:00  Music. Brian  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Today Jason  0:12  we'll be talking about pandemic by z Man games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason, Brian  0:20  this is Brian. Anna  0:21  This is Anna.  Yann  0:22  and Yann.  Jason  0:23  So not only do we have a special guest, we have two special guests this time today. Anna swetsu, actually, I don't know that I can pronounce your last name, so I'll just let you two introduce yourselves. Anna  0:34  Okay, so I'm Doctor Anna Szuecs, my last name is Hungarian too. I'm a Swiss Hungarian doctor. I'm doing research in mental health currently at the National University of Singapore, Yann  0:45  and I'm Yann Boucher. I'm a French Canadian originally, and I'm a microbiologist by training. I work on microbial evolution, infectious diseases, environmental surveillance and whatnot.  Jason  0:55  And so you can probably guess why we have Anna and Jan on here is because this is a game about medicine and epidemiology and the spread of disease.  Before we jump into the game though, we like to do fun science facts. We always offer our guests the first opportunity something interesting. You've learned about science lately. You want to share? Yann  1:10  Okay, I've got a scary one for you. Have you ever watched the TV show? The Last of Us?  Jason  1:15  I've heard of it. I haven't watched it. Brian  1:16   I know it exists. I know it's based on the video game.  Yann  1:19  Yeah, yeah. So the first scene of the show is the best because they it's a fake interview, like in the 1960s of two microbiologists, one's a mycologist, you know, one's a virologist, and they're asking them what's most dangerous. And of course, the virologist says, Okay, it's the virus that's gonna kill us. There's gonna be a pandemic. And the other guy, that mycologist is not afraid of that at all, and he says it's gonna be the fungi. But the virologist says, not a fungi. They don't grow at body temperature. This only do skin infection. It's not a problem. The mycologist says, Yes, but what if the world was going to get a little warmer? What would happen? The fungi would evolve to be temperature tolerant, and then what happened? We lose this is the best scene You should watch it. I played in every every one of my classes.  Jason  2:01  Okay, so basically, "the last of us" came about because climate change induced adaptation of parasitic fungi. That is, you're right, that is kind of scary,  Ya

#Earth #Biome #Biodiversity #Terrain #Flora #Tableau #BoardGames #Science #SciComm #InsideUpGames Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Overview Welcome to the wonderful (and complicated) world of Earth, a tableau- and engine-building game by Maxime Tardif and Inside-Up Games. In this episode we talk with Dr. Alex Strauss about ecology, ecosystems, biomes, and just how complicated things can get with a handful of cards. Timestamps 0:00 - Introduction and Guest Introduction 0:58 - Initial Game Experience and Strategy 1:52 - Science Topic: Biodiversity and Biomass 8:35 - Discussion on Game Complexity and Rules 9:53 - Game Mechanics and Strategy 15:09 - Development and Theming of the Game 22:34 - Biome Concept and Ecosystem Interactions 32:55 - Nitpick Corner and Gameplay Experience 45:00 - Final Grades and Closing Remarks Links Earth, by Inside Up Games Earth Designer's Diary IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology Köppen Climate Classification OneEarth.org Navigator (Bioregions) This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Jason  0:00  Music. Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:11  Today, we're going to discuss Earth, by Inside-Up Games. All right, hey, welcome back to Gaming with Science. This is Brian, Jason  0:26  this is Jason, Alex  0:27  and this is Alex.  Brian  0:28  Hey, Alex, how's it going? We've got another guest host today. Alex Strauss, why don't you introduce yourself? Alex  0:34  Yeah, I'm happy to be here. So my name is Alex Strauss, I am an assistant professor in the ecology school at UGA, and I'm a card carrying ecologist, so I was happy to play the ecology themed game. Brian  0:49  Yeah, we appreciate it. It's nice to get somebody who really knows their stuff.  Jason  0:53  And this is a milestone. This is the first time we've actually been able to meet one of our guests in person and actually play the game with them, like this is history now. Alex  1:02  Oh my gosh, I can't, I can't imagine having to do this without having played the game. You know, that seems like such a fundamental part of having this all work. Brian  1:10  Not only that, you kicked both of our butts on your first time playing. Alex  1:15  I had no idea what the score was, and I wasn't as surprised as either of you. So maybe that card carrying ecologist thing actually, like, actually paid off for you.  Well, I don't know if my ecologist skills translated at all to this particular game. I was struggling to keep up with, with all the rules and ways to score and just kind of playing cards that seemed fun to me. So maybe that's a strategy for anyone out there who's listening is, don't overthink it and just play some cards. And who knows what'll happen? Jason  1:44  Yeah, we'll get into the complexity later. Brian  1:46  Before we get into the game, why don't we do our science topic? Alex, I don't know if you had anything to talk about today.  Alex  1:52  Sure. I, so I looked up some statistics. These aren't necessarily things that all ecologists sort of walk around knowing, but, this game made me want to do a little bit of research. So the two things I was trying to look up were, how many species are there in the world? What proportion of those are plants? And if, instead of just counting species, like one for each species, what if we count how much carbon or biomass is locked in those different things, like, how important are plants in the big picture? This being a plant themed game, that's sort of where, where my mind went. So okay, so here's here's the numbers, here's the statistics. And the thing that was pretty surprising to me: how much uncertainty there is in our estimates of pretty much all those things. So estimates for total number of species in the world ranges

#Science #BoardGames #SciComm #Terraforming #Mars #Exobiology #Astrobiology #Regolith  Introduction Today we talk about Terraforming Mars, with special guest Dr. Laura Fackrell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We cover how Mars lost its atmosphere, whether you really can survive off just potatoes, what makes regolith different from soil, the ethics of terraforming, reality TV, and why you should probably read Elon Musk's End-User License Agreement. Many thanks to Dr. Fackrell, and we hope you have fun journeying with us to the red planet! Timestamps 00:35 - Introductions 01:40 - Martian potatoes 02:52 - Game background 10:06 - Martian atmosphere 16:42 - How to grow stuff on Mars 23:06 - Regolith versus Soil 27:44 - Terraforming priorities & ethics 39:08 - Final grades Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Links Terraforming Mars official website (Fryx Games) Mars One (Wikipedia) Stars on Mars (IMDB) Terraforming Mars in Science Fiction (Wikipedia)   This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.   Full Transcript Brian  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:12  Today we'll be talking about Terraforming Mars by FryxGames. Hey everyone. Jason here with a quick heads up about today's episode, we notice there's a few little audio hiccups and hangs throughout the episode, nothing huge, but it seems that the server we were using to record the audio was lagging a little bit in the process. We're sorry about that, and we're going to work to try to make sure it doesn't happen again. So with that, thank you, and on with the show.  Brian  0:35  Hey, I'm Brian.  Jason  0:36  This is Jason.  Laura  0:37  This is Laura,  Jason  0:38  and welcome back to gaming with science. We have another special guest star today. This is Dr Laura Fackrell from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Laura, can you give us a quick introduction to yourself? Please?  Laura  0:48  Sure! I am Dr Laura Fakhrill, I am a geologist by training. So a lot of what I do, I'm familiar with a lot of things about rock and geology and place, tectonics and all sorts of things, but what I apply that to is really niche area called geomicrobiology, which looks at the interactions with microbes and rocks and also plants. Is something else. I've applied it to you. So my current work, I focus a lot on, how do you take the materials that are available on the moon, or that would be available on the moon if humans were there, and trying to turn that into something that can support agriculture. Brian  1:20  That's super cool.  Jason  1:21  Yeah. And the reason why I asked Laura to be on this episode is because I knew her when she was a graduate student, when she was doing basically the same things, but for Martian soil, right, correct? Yes, or Martian regolith, I guess it's technically not soil. We can get into the difference of that a little bit later. So first off, the fun science fact, Brian, what fun science have you learned recently? Brian  1:40  Oh, well, I usually try to find something that I think is themed. So this was making the rounds a couple years ago, right around the release of The Martian. Maybe you saw this about, can you survive on a diet of nothing but potatoes? Did you see this making the rounds? I'm sure everybody did.  Jason  1:54  I didn't actually, no. Brian  1:56   Oh, you didn't? So the short answer is, sort of, you actually can't get vitamin B12 from potatoes. You need to, at least not in the current form. Of course, in the movie The Martian, he get plenty of vitamins to take that presumably would have provided B12. The meme was that you could survive on a diet of potatoes and butter, the butter providing the vitamin B12. Can you survive for a long time on that diet? Yes. Would you be hea

Today we cover Cytosis, a worker-placement game about cell biology from Genius Games. This is one of our all-time high scorers, with both excellent science and excellent gameplay. Join us for a tour de cell as we go through the nucleus, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi, mitochondria, and cell membrane, plus gush over how cute kinesins are and argue about whether bacteria have organelles. Find our socials at GamingWithScience.net  #BoardGames #Science #CellBiology #GeniusGames #Cytosis #Protein #RNA #DNA #Hormones Timestamps: 00:51 - Protein sequencing 03:54 - Intro to Genius Games 06:50 - Intro to Cytosis 12:48 - Cells & their parts 16:06 - RNA & ribosomes 20:22 - Endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi, & hormones 24:48 - Mitochondria & glucose transport 27:11 - Learning from the game 28:40 - Bacteria 30:58 - Inconsequential nitpicks 36:11 - Final grades Links: Official Website (Genius Games) Reverse Translation (preprint) Video of John Conveyou Organelles of a Euakaryotic cell (Wikipedia) Kinsesin motor proteins This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript: Jason  0:00  Music. Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:12  Today, we're going to discuss Cytosis by Genius Games. Hey, I'm Brian. Jason  0:21  This is Jason. Brian  0:23  Welcome back to Gaming with Science. Today, we're going to talk about Cytosis, a cell biology game. It was a game designed by John Coveyou by Genius Games. I don't know why it's taken us this long to do a Genius Games game, considering they are specialists in hard science games, and they seem to share the exact same core values as gaming with Science. I know this is our first. I'm sure it won't be our last. But anyway, before we get into that game, Jason, do you have anything for us to banter about? Jason  0:51  Well, I like the science topics, and you actually pointed me out to one that's related to this, which is a preprint. So you've got publications in final journals, but you also these things called Preprints, which is where you post your paper up before it's been peer-reviewed, so you can get the results out. You can kind of stake a claim to it. But according to their preprint, they've developed a way to do not quite reverse translation, but something similar. So we're going to talk about this more later today, where translation is where you take the genetic information from a cell and turn it into protein, and it's generally a one way street. You can't go back, but this group has developed a method to, not so much go backwards, but at least to take the proteins apart in such a way that it's encoded in DNA that they can then sequence and get back out. And this is really cool, because we're really good, like we as a field, science is very good at sequencing DNA right now. DNA sequencing in some form, has been around for 40, 50, years, but high throughput sequencing has been around for at least 20 years now. Ee're very, very good at it now. In fact, we're astonishingly good at how much DNA we can sequence. We suck at sequencing proteins. It can be done. It's like, don't get me wrong, there are methods to do it, but compared to what we can do with DNA, it's slow, it's expensive, it's hard, and I don't know that this method really solves all of those problems, but it potentially gets rid of some of them. And if we can find a way of turning proteins, protein information, into DNA information, and just hooking into the existing DNA sequencing infrastructure, that could open up whole new ways of looking at biology, looking at things, because most of the time, it's the protein that matters. We look at the DNA because the DNA is easy, but most of that, one way or another, ends up in a protein, either directly or by changing which proteins are

#Evolution #NaturalSelection #Darwin #Competition #BoardGames #Science Today we get down and dirty with Evolution, which is both a board game and that wonderful emergent property that happens when you have species competing for finite resources (including little food tokens on a game board). Joining us is a special evolutionary biologist guest, Dr. Thiago da Silva Moreira, who will help us walk through evolution, mutation, natural selection, sex, and other fun topics. Find our socials at www.GamingWithScience.net  Timestamps 00:24 - Special guest host Thiago 01:26 - Spider milk! 03:34 - Basics of Evolution 13:37 - Evolutionary science 18:35 - Mutation 24:24 - Competition and the Red Queen's Race 29:38 - What is sex for? 33:30 - Final Grades 39:27 - Fun species names Links: Evolution website (North Star Games) Original game (Right Games RGB)  Spider milk! Red Queen Hypothesis Lamarck This episode of Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Brian  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.  Jason  0:11  Today, we will be talking about Evolution by North Star games. All right. Welcome back out everyone. This is Jason.  Brian  0:22  This is Brian.  Tiago  0:22  I am Thiago.  Jason  0:24  Yes, we have another special guest star. So this is Thiago. Moreira Thiago, can you please introduce yourself to our audience?  Tiago  0:29  Sure. I'm a, what I like to say, Brazilian by birth, American by choice. I'm a evolutionary biologist. I'm a professor here at the George Washington University. I have my graduation was back in Brazil in Rio. I got like a bachelor's in biology, a master's in zoology, and I have a PhD in evolutionary biology for the George Washington University too. Jason   0:49   All right. And then we met last year at Fear the Con, which is a gaming convention in St Louis, for a different podcast that we both listen to Fear the Boot if anyone is also a fellow Booter out there. We want to get Thiago on here, because he is an actual evolutionary biologist. And although Brian and I, we work with evolution a lot, you can't work in biology without learning a lot about evolution. It is the glue that holds our discipline together. But it's nice to have someone who actually studies evolution for their career to come on and talk to us about Evolution, which is a great game, by the way. I do really enjoy Evolution, the board game. So, but before we get into that, now, Thiago, you told us that you had a fun science fact to share for today,  Tiago  1:26  Right! So the science fact that I found out, it was very interesting for me. So my specialty, what I do, my model organism, I use spiders to do my work on biology and evolution. One of the papers that I found recently that was not, it's not that recent, but was pretty stunning for me was one of 2018 when we found out, like Apparently, some spiders feed their younglings with milk.  Jason  1:50  Oh the spider milk story! I remember that. Brian  1:54  That's awful.  Jason  1:56  What do you mean that's awful? That's what humans do. Brian  2:00  No, no, actually, I pigeons use milk. Milk is more common than you'd think  Tiago  2:04  It is, actually, though, when I was reading about it and I was telling this in class to my students, I was making the case. It's not exactly like mammalian milk, which is kind of something very unique for mammalians, but they use milk in and as a very like liberal in a very liberal way. It's not that uncommon, if you think of like, a lot of like different invertebrates do that. But the finding out this, and using this, the way was used, was pretty stunning to see. I never heard about that in spiders. Spiders are mainly predators, so I mean, they hunt, and even the young spiders, they hunt since pretty often. So that was a

#Interview #Maize #Corn #Genetics #Scientists It's our mid-season break, so we've got a bonus episode talking to a handful of game-loving scientists at the 2024 Maize Genetics Meeting. We talk about science, games, perseverence, the winding path of becoming a scientist, and plenty more.  Timestamps 01:35 - Introductions02:25 - How did you get into science?06:28 - What do you research?09:38 - Favorite games?12:29 - Turning your work into a game?14:24 - Advice to aspiring scientists17:44 - Closing remarks Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Links 2024 Maize Genetics Meeting Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Brian  0:06  Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:14  Welcome back to Gaming with Science. This is Jason and it's just me today. So right now we're technically in our mid season break. But to make sure y'all have something, I want to introduce you to a bunch of scientists I met at the Maize Genetics Meeting back in March. And that's maize as in corn, not maze as in puzzles. Although of course, you may have been to a corn maze, which is actually a maze maze. And yeah, anyway, one of my goals with this podcast was trying to show the human side of scientists, we see a bunch of things in Hollywood where scientists are all uber-nerdy or geeky or have no social life. And I want to show that scientists are human, we have interests, we play games, we have fun. And so when I was back at this conference, I wanted to show off what real scientists are like and so I grabbed a microphone and started grabbing some people and just talking with them and ask them questions about how they got into science, what games they like, how we could turn their research into a game, that sort of thing. So, many thanks to the people who let me interview them: Briana, Chip, Jacob, Kate, Kyle, Lauren, and Mohammed; I'll let them all introduce themselves in a little bit. To keep things from getting repetitive, I spliced all the interviews together. So you'll hear me asking one question, but then you'll hear a bunch of them in turn, even though they were recorded at different times in different places, you'll have different amounts of background noises depending on where we were and how much stuff was going on at the time. Also, you probably guessed that being a maize genetics conference, corn genetics, everyone here works on corn. If you'd like this, we'll try to do a few more we'll maybe get some other ones. So without further ado, I'm just gonna let everyone introduce themselves and I hope you enjoy this.  Okay, so first off, can you please introduce yourself? Brianna  1:37  My name is Brianna Griffin. I'm originally from Florida, but I'm actually at Iowa State University where I study molecular plant pathology. Chip  1:44  Yeah, I'm Chip Hunter. I work for the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Gainesville, Florida. Jacob  1:51  I am Jacob Kelly. I am a PhD student at the University of Missouri. Kate  1:56  I'm Kate Eastman, and I'm a graduate student at Purdue and Jen Wisecavers lab. Kyle  2:01  Hi, my name is Kyle Swentowski. I'm a postdoctoral fellow in David Jackson's lab at Cold Spring Harbor. Lauren  2:07  I'm Lauren Whitt. I'm a postdoc at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, just recently graduated and I'm a plant genetic researcher. Mohammed  2:17  My name is Mohammed El-Walid. I'm a fourth year PhD candidate at Cornell University working in Ed Buckler's lab. Jason  2:25  So what got you into science in the first place? Brianna  2:27  I've always been interested in science but it was it's a kind of an interesting path though. I actually went to an art school for middle and high school, like science was definitely not the focus at our school, but I just always rea

#Chemistry #Bonds #Scientists #LabWork #ScienceGames It's time to grab some atoms and make some bonds! In this episode we cover Compounded: The Peer-Reviewed Edition by Greater Than Games. We'll cover chemistry basics, how bonds work, a bit of what it's like in an actual research lab, and why sabotaging others is fun in games but not so much in real life. Timestamps 00:53 - Corn diversity for humans05:05 - Basics of the game11:30 - Basics of atoms & electrons17:00 - Making bonds22:17 - What makes things explode?27:59 - Depiction of scientists37:48 - Final grades Find our socials at GamingWithScience.net  Game Results [Not recorded, but apparently Jason won by a lot] Links Compounded: The Peer-Reviewed Edition Crash Course Chemistry  Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Jason  0:06  Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of the favorite games. Brian  0:13  In today's episode we're going to discuss compounded by Greater than Games. Hey, I'm Brian, this is Jason. And welcome back to the fifth episode of Gaming with Science. Today we're going to talk about Compounded: the Peer-Reviewed Edition, which is an interesting chemistry game created by Darrell Louder. But before we get into that, Jason, do you have any science topics for us to talk about today? Jason  0:39  So I do have one and this one is close to my heart. It has nothing to do with chemistry. Sorry. So I was again at a conference recently, actually, we're gonna have a bonus episode out probably next month, the maize genetics meeting. So the big meeting for all the corn geneticists, a lot of us based in the US, also some outside. But I was talking to one of the USDA researchers there, Sherry Flint-Garcia, who I've known for a few years. And I love her work, because she's got these projects that are looking at corn from a human consumption point of view. So basically, corn that people eat. This is one thing that comes up a lot, we grow a lot of corn here in the US, and almost none of it goes to humans. Most of it goes to animal feed, and a small amount goes to ethanol. And then some of it, a little tiny bit, gets made into like tortillas and chips and sweet corn and stuff. But she has all these projects that are looking at corn from the human perspective. So she's been working with local groups to do tortilla-making quality on corn for a while. I believe she's working with one group now on whiskey, and how to make that. And then the one that I'm really cool that she's doing a big evaluation of like 1000 traditional varieties of corn from the US just to evaluate, like how they perform, because people haven't looked at this information in decades. But there's things they're like, they have different flavor profiles, they have different use profiles. You know, for being one of the largest producers of corn in the world, the US, just, we don't appreciate it at all. I mean, you go down to Mexico, they appreciate their corn, I mean, corn is a big deal in Mexico, you don't mess with their corn, but here in the US, it's like we don't care. And that's kind of sad. So I'm glad that there's someone doing that now. And I hope they come up with some really cool stuff out of there. I hope they get some good evaluations, they can find some varieties that work well and that people can use for actual eating varieties. Brian  2:22  I really was hoping you were gonna say she was doing a big study of popcorn varieties.  Jason  2:26  No, she doesn't do popcorn, although I think she has a collaborator who's actually specifically looking at all the popcorn varieties in there. Yeah, we, we're both plant people. We could go off on this for a full hour in terms of all the varieties and their adaptations and stuff. And I mean, I love genetic diversity among plants. And we coul

#SpaceExploration #StellarHorizons #Space #CompassGames  Find our socials at GamingWithScience.net  This month we head to the final frontier, with Stellar Horizons from Compass Games. We also have our very first guest host, Christoph Wagner from Kennedy Space Center. We talk about near-future space exploration, colonization, asteroids, launch failures, space pirates, and more. Timestamps 00:44 - Meet Christoph Wagner03:19 - Science facts - Rusty Mars and poisonous oxygen05:26 - Stellar Horizons game overview & mechanics15:25 - Science overview17:01 - Reusable rockets18:47 - Space politics and game factions23:50 - Astronomy in the game26:00 - Space combat and space pirates!29:25 - Getting to Mars & the Lagrange points32:26 - Game tweaks wish list39:41 - Final grades Game Results  - Game 1: Earth destroyed by asteroid - Game 2: China and Russia save Earth from asteroid! Links Stellar Horizons official website (Note: Rules PDF *is* downloadable from here) Kennedy Space Center The Great Oxygenation Event Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript Brian  0:06  Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talked about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:11  Today, we'll be talking about Stellar Horizons by compass games. All right, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason. Brian  0:22  This is Brian. Christoph  0:23  This is Christoph Jason  0:24  So yes, we have our very first special guest host here. Christopher Wagner. Wagner or Wagner? Christoph  0:29  Wagner is the German way to say it and Wagner here in the States, that's fine.  Jason  0:33  For those of you who know the game, this is a game about near Earth space exploration. Brian and I are plant biologists we have no expertise here. So we wanted to get someone on who actually knew what they were talking about. So Christoph, tell us about yourself. Christoph  0:44  Sure. So I am I have a degree in physics and master's degree in mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering. I'm originally come from Germany and did my mechanical engineering in physics in Germany, and then studied aerospace engineering at Purdue University with a major in astrodynamics control and guidance, navigation and control theory. Unfortunately, after I got done with that degree, I could not get a job in that field here in the US because of my German citizenship. And most of those jobs do require a higher levels of security clearances. And so I ended up working Caterpillar for 10 years, Jason  1:19  not involved in space exploration Christoph  1:21  not involved in space at all, unfortunately, but then through some, I got let go from Caterpillar in 2016 ended up in a company, a hydraulics company up in Minnesota, but that got way cold for me. So I only lasted two years. And I took a job at Walt Disney Imagineering down here in Orlando. So I designed or I was part of the ride team that designed the Guardians of the Galaxy cosmic rewind roller coaster at Epcot Center.  Brian  1:49  I just rode that. That's so much fun.  Christoph  1:51  Yes, yes, it is a lot of fun. And it was a lot of fun designing it too. But I was only a contractor. So when COVID hit, they let me go. And I was unemployed for a few months, and obviously started looking and I found this job that was essentially almost tailored for me at Kennedy Space Center, which is fluid design engineer. So I applied it took a while but in October 2020, I started my position as a fluid design engineer at Kennedy Space Center, I worked for a contractor for NASA contractor called Jacobs. And my main responsibility these days is that I'm the lead contract engineer for the hydraulic systems on the mobile launch tower ordinance.  Brian  2:33  That's very cool.  Christoph  2:34   It's very cool to say that I am actually part of the Artemis team.