Gaming with Science

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  • Resumen

  • The Gaming with Science Podcast looks at the intersection of science and tabletop board games, with the occasional dip into video games, RPGs, game theory, or whatever else the dice roll up. If you ever wondered how natural selection shows up in Evolution, whether Cytosis reflects actual cell metabolism, or what the socioeconomics of Monopoly are, this is the place for you. (And if not, we hope you’ll give us a try anyway.) So grab a drink, pull up a chair, and let’s place dice with the universe!
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0)
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Episodios
  • S1E8 - Terraforming Mars (Martian Science)

    S1E8 - Terraforming Mars (Martian Science)
    Sep 25 2024
    #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 - Introductions01:40 - Martian potatoes02:52 - Game background10:06 - Martian atmosphere16:42 - How to grow stuff on Mars23:06 - Regolith versus Soil27:44 - Terraforming priorities & ethics39:08 - 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) 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 healthy on that diet? Almost certainly not. So those are different things. I suppose. I also saw a study recently where somebody tried to simulate, can you grow potatoes in simulated Martian regolith? And they said, sort of. So maybe it's not completely out of the question. Jason 2:36 Yeah, and I assume when you're marooned, if you're marooned an entire planetary orbit away from Earth. Survival is number one. You can worry about quality of life after that, Brian 2:44 Yeah, but you're not gonna get scurvy. Potatoes actually have a good amount of vitamin C in them. They provide a lot of calories. They are a good plant for that purpose. Jason 2:52 Okay, so everyone probably got from the show title we're talking today about Terraforming Mars by FryxGames. So little background about the game itself. First, FryxGames is a Swedish company. It's distributed by Stronghold games here in the US, FryxGames is actually a family business. You look on their website, they're all members of the Fryxelius family, which is just an awesome surname. It's like, I'm jealous of their surname. And Jacob Fryxelius is listed as the designer of the game with ...
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    45 m
  • S1E7 - Cytosis (Cell Biology)

    S1E7 - Cytosis (Cell Biology)
    Aug 28 2024
    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 sequencing03:54 - Intro to Genius Games06:50 - Intro to Cytosis12:48 - Cells & their parts16:06 - RNA & ribosomes20:22 - Endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi, & hormones24:48 - Mitochondria & glucose transport27:11 - Learning from the game28:40 - Bacteria30:58 - Inconsequential nitpicks36:11 - Final grades Links: Official Website (Genius Games)Reverse Translation (preprint)Video of John ConveyouOrganelles of a Euakaryotic cell (Wikipedia)Kinsesin motor proteins 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 around. And so being able to look at the proteins more directly gives us a lot more information about diseases, about things that in plant science we care about, like crop production or disease resistance. It's like there's a really cool thing that could open up there. And so even if this group doesn't work out, I hope someone manages to, like, build off of this and make it work. Brian 3:00 This is the first time I've seen a preprint, and be like, someone's going to get a Nobel Prize for this idea. Maybe not this group, but somebody's going to get this to work, and somebody's going to have a Nobel Prize for this. I mean, the whole idea about DNA. Why are we so good at doing DNA? Because DNA is set up to make copies of itself, right? You can take a very small amount of nucleic acid and using a process called the polymerase chain reaction, generate massive amounts of DNA. You can go from one molecule to a billion in a couple of hours. So you could start from a low amount of material and work up to a huge amount of material. But proteins don't do that right? It's one direction. So the only way to read the proteins out is you just make more and more and more sensitive instruments. It's ...
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    40 m
  • S1E6 - Evolution (Natural Selection)

    S1E6 - Evolution (Natural Selection)
    Jul 31 2024
    #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 Thiago01:26 - Spider milk!03:34 - Basics of Evolution13:37 - Evolutionary science18:35 - Mutation24:24 - Competition and the Red Queen's Race29:38 - What is sex for?33:30 - Final Grades39:27 - Fun species names Links: Evolution website (North Star Games)Original game (Right Games RGB) Spider milk!Red Queen HypothesisLamarck 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 particular Jumping Spider, we actually mimics an ant and like to find out this was really I wasn't expecting, Jason 2:46 okay, so is the milk. I assume it's just some sort of liquid that's secreted from some gland on the spider that it feeds to its young. Is that right? Tiago 2:53 Right, so spiders, they have, like the structure in their in the the abdomen, called like the the big gastric fur, which is a cup here that has the openings, and like, in that particular spot, they have some glandular they'll actually secrete some, like a liquid which is apparently highly nutritious. And the young, the first things that they eat is that liquid. And at some point they have, like, an alternation between eating that and start to hunt. And then when they're weaned off. They only do hunting, Brian 3:22 Yeah, I guess it kind of makes sense. You think, like spiders are very good at secreting proteins. That is something they do. It's the raw material for evolution to then adapt into a new function, Tiago 3:33 yeah. Jason 3:34 And I think that gives us the perfect segueway to actually talk about this game Evolution. So ...
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    42 m
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