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  • S2E09 - Daybreak (Climate Change)

    S2E09 - Daybreak (Climate Change)
    2025/09/24
    #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 - Introductions01:31 - Baby pterosaurs and frog saunas06:11 - Playing Daybreak22:53 - Designer choices27:50 - Sense of urgency32:45 - Tipping points40:44 - Ocean acidification47:05 - Clean energy as the focus52:53 - RCP and climate projections58:50 - What are fossil fuels?1:02:00 - Niggling nitpicks1:07:12 - 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 particular location, does have a tendency to have a lot of young pterosaurs in it. The fossils that are kind of coming out of this location tend to be on the young side, and these particular baby pterosaurs had evidence in their bones of there's like twisting and breakages, and it's thought that they were basically killed in a severe windstorm. And and pterosaur fossils in general are very rare because they have really fragile bones, and so the fact that we have juveniles with direct evidence of trauma is pretty unique and exciting. These kinds of fossils for from animals from a young age help us to understand more about the biomechanics or the ability of these animals to fly. But also, there are of the hundreds of pterosaur fossils that have been found, A lot of them are very small and very young, and it just suggests that, you know, this was a really rough life for these animals to be flyers when the when the storms were, you know, maybe even more intense than...
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    1 時間 15 分
  • S2E07 - Genotype (Genetics)

    S2E07 - Genotype (Genetics)
    2025/08/27
    #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 Introductions01:30 New paper on Mendel's Peas04:46 Overview of Genotype Game08:16 The Meatball Incident13:45 Who was Gregor Mendel?16:08 The seven pea genes20:36 How to break a gene27:47 The Modern Synthesis of biology31:04 Dominant and recessive genes38:22 Mendelian genes in humans44:59 Nitpick corner48:40 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 sequencing effort across a huge diversity of domesticated and wild pea species, and they were able to do something called a genome wide association study. So they looked to see which plants had a particular phenotype, they looked at their genotype, and we're kind of able to say it's like, well, if we look at this sort of mathematically, we can see that everything that has this feature seems to be pointed down to this region of the genome. And we're able to identify these last three genes and and really it's interesting, right? Because we knew about genetics way earlier than we understand how heredity actually worked, how DNA worked, how any of that stuff worked, because it follows simple mathematic principles. And actually, what's interesting is a lot of times it's about how genes get broken. And this study in particular was sort of understanding the for the most part, the way that these traits were associated with breaking these seven genes in very specific and very different ...
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    54 分
  • S2E06 - Atiwa (Fruit bats)

    S2E06 - Atiwa (Fruit bats)
    2025/07/30
    #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 Introductions01:30 Humans and honeyguides05:55 Bats avoiding collisions during rush-hour09:43 Atiwa gameplay21:12 The study behind Atiwa26:58 What is that fruit?31:44 Uwe Rosenberg does great outreach35:25 Exosystem services39:48 More bat facts!42:10 Nitpick corner45:58 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 networkTautonym - 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 greater Honeyguide, which is a species that kind of indicates to honey badgers, but also humans, in this case, where to find bee nests as a resource for honey and for the honey guides also as a resource for the beeswax. And she's been working on this for a great time, a great long time. And I once saw a couple of years ago a plenary talk by her having never heard about her work. And it was absolutely amazing, because so this greater honey guide. The Latin name for that is Indicator indicator, which I think is really fun. Brian 2:25 I love a I can't remember the term for when the genus and species are the same name. It's my very favorite. Marielle 2:31 I also don't remember, Brian 2:32 yeah, I'll look it up. I did know that taxonomically, you cannot do that for plants. Marielle 2:36 It's, it is, yeah, just animals. And I don't know about mushrooms. Brian 2:39 I don't know about mushrooms either. I might look that up. Marielle 2:43 But anyway...
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    55 分
  • S2E05.1 - Harmonies and Planet (Ecological Niches)

    S2E05.1 - Harmonies and Planet (Ecological Niches)
    2025/06/25
    #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 Introduction01:06 Trees weaponizing lightning03:54 Harmonies overview08:31 Planet overview12:25 Compare and contrast17:24 Humans and vertebrate bias19:39 Niche specialization22:53 No science grades24:18 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, but if a lightning strike comes by and hits you, then you're dead. And so I don't know, I think there's actually a decent selective advantage of like, Hey, if you can survive lightning, great. And then, because presumably, if you get struck by lightning, a lot of that current is going through whatever is nearby to you as well or touching you, then it may be able to clear off some of your competitors or parasites that aren't so adapted. Jason 2:23 But? but how do? how do? How survive lightning? Jason 2:49 So the article I read, which I will link in the show notes, I think it's a hypothesis. I don't think they have the mechanism yet, but they hypothesize that the interior is like highly conductive, and so it conducts the electricity without really building up a lot of heat, which the heat happens because of resistance? Brian 3:07 Yeah Jason 3:07 So if it conducts it well, then it's almost like an insulated wire, where the it's ...
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    28 分
  • S2E05 - The Search for Planet X (Planetary Science)

    S2E05 - The Search for Planet X (Planetary Science)
    2025/05/28
    #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 - Introductions03:02 - Space smells and asteroid threats07:28 - Game overview16:46 - What is Planet X?20:22 - Hunting for things in our solar system27:14 - What do we learn from planetary science?31:56 - Extrasolar planets38:03 - Logic rules and real bodies43:39 - In-game publishing & real-world controveries47:18 - Nitpick corner50:17 - Final grades55:49 - 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 quarks enjoys being beauty, not bottom. Brian 2:22 So are you allowed to have more than six hosts? Then do you just have to nominate people on and kick people off? Addie 2:29 We've had two tops technically. So as we've had people iterate through, Jason 2:34 well, you can get someone to be the gluon, holding them together. Addie 2:37 Yeah, exactly. And some quirks have lasted longer than others. So we've, we've had a couple of replacements, Jason 2:43 All right, well, I think that's already given us one fun science fact is the quarks in matter, but let's go on. Brian 2:48 I guess it is. Jason 2:49 We'd like to start with some fun science fact and Addie as our guest. You get priority. Is there something fun about science that you've learned or run across lately you want to share? Addie 2:58 Oh, man, let me go. Let me go. Second, I have to think about it a little bit Brian 3:02 more. ...
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    58 分
  • S2E04 - Undergrove (Mycorrhizae mushrooms)

    S2E04 - Undergrove (Mycorrhizae mushrooms)
    2025/04/30
    #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 Introductions02:33 Killer vines and efficient fungi07:20 Game overview17:30 What are fungi?20:56 Different types of mycorrhizae27:48 Nutrient exchange30:45 The mother tree controversy41:32 Nitpick corner45:57 Grades56:09 Avatar inspiration58:04 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 fun conversations about sort of science and metaphor and how we communicate science. I think that's definitely part of this. But let's talk about some other science for a bit. So Anny, we usually send this to the guests first. Do you have an interesting science fact you'd like to share with our dear listeners? , Anny 2:42 yeah since you did tell me that you were gonna ask me this question, and I actually did, recently find out something super cool, and so a colleague of mine at Rice University recently published a short little correspondence in Current Biology where he and his students found an instance of a plant in some way eating an insect. And so this is a parasitic plant that usually parasitizes oaks, I believe. And this same oak is also parasitized by gall forming wasps. And so what they found is that this parasitic plant also actively parasitizes the galls that have the wasps in them and kills the Wasp, which is really cool. It's like a reversal of ...
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    59 分
  • S2E03 - Turing Machine (Computation)

    S2E03 - Turing Machine (Computation)
    2025/03/26
    #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 - Introduction2:11 - Laser cooling, plate tectonics, and DNA data storage9:39 - Turing Machine game overview18:37 - The magic behind the punchcards23:15 - Who was Alan Turing and his machine?32:54 - Data storage and punchcards40:59 - Boolean math & quantum computing46:06 - Nitpicks and final grades54:38 - 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 computerRunning Magic the Gathering as a computerHalf-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 different experiences and background Brian 2:11 that is remarkable. I have tried to explain, tried to explain laser cooling to my oldest son, to no avail. Stephen 2:20 Oh, yeah, I bet. Brian 2:21 But can you explain? How do you cool something with a laser beam? Speaker 1 2:26 The most straightforward way is a method called evaporative cooling that works like it sounds. It's sort of like what tends to happen if you've got a hot cup of coffee where the liquid in there is really, really hot, and so the water molecules bounce around. And then occasionally, they bounce around in such a way that one of them gets more energy and the other gets less energy, like the overall total is conserved, but one of them gets enough energy that it can turn into vapor and escape, leaving behind cooler atoms. So we would start with just as many atoms as we could pile into a trap that was formed out of the electromagnetic potential that you could create with atomic laser beams....
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    56 分
  • S2E02 - Gut Check (Microbiome)

    S2E02 - Gut Check (Microbiome)
    2025/02/26
    #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 Introduction1:17 Microbiome body odor & sweat4:47 Gut Check overview10:45 Microbiome science17:02 Antibiotics and phage therapy23:05 Prebiotics and Probiotics26:59 Game history & design41:52 Giving the game away47:01 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. There is a dipeptide, so two amino acids stuck onto a thiol alcohol. It has some name that's quite complicated, so I'll stick with thiol alcohol. Thiol means sulfur, so a lot of stinky compounds tend to have sulfur in them. The alcohol, I assume, just means it's very volatile, which means it's going to spread through the air very easily. Jason 2:36 And now I see why you got this, because your whole thing is stinky plant compounds all made os sulfur Brian 2:39 Exactly! There's actually a deeper connection here. So I study onions, garlic and that type of defensive chemistry. There is a very meaningful connection here. The compound itself doesn't smell like anything. It's odorless. Supposedly, I found a couple of things that said it actually is an antimicrobial in and of itself that it can bind to ureases and actually can kill bacteria. So bacteria, particularly Streptococcus hominis, which as you can imagine, it takes this name because it lives on ...
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    54 分