Épisodes

  • S3E02 - Finspan (Fish)
    Feb 25 2026
    #Finspan #StonemaierGames #ElizabethHargrave #Wingspan #ScienceCommunication #Oceans #Fish #BoardGames #Science Summary In this episode we discuss the game "Finspan" by Stonemaier Games, and are joined by Emily Melvin, a PhD candidate in marine science at Duke University. In a game that's basically "Wingspan but with fish", we talk about the game differs from its predecessor, all whole bunch of different fish, what IS a fish, deep-sea nightmares, lovely bioluminescence, ecosystems, invasive species, and just how much we still don't know about our oceans. So take a dive with us into the undersea world of fish and Finspan, and let's have fun playing dice with the Universe. Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions01:41 - Fish bones and flatfish04:17 - Overview of Finspan10:02 - What is a fish?13:41 - Fish eating fish17:31 - Ocean dimensionality23:31 - Young and schools29:14 - Deep-ocean nightmares32:46 - Bioluminescence and venom36:35 - Threats to the ocean43:46 - Nitpicks and constructive criticism50:14 - Final grades55:05 - Sign-offs Links Finspan (Stonemaier Games) and on TabletopiaSingle origin of flat fish (Nature Genetics)Seas the Day (Marine podcast from Duke University)Emily Melvin's professional website and Bluesky profile 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 science behind some of your favorite games. Jason Wallace 0:11 Today we'll be talking about finspan by Stonemaier games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian, and today we are joined by a special guest, Emily Melvin from Duke University. Emily, will you please introduce yourself for our audience? Emily 0:27 Yeah, hi. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Emily Melvin, and I am a PhD candidate in the marine science and conservation program at Duke's Marine Lab, which is in Beaufort, North Carolina. And I study issues of policy and governance. So broadly speaking, my work focuses on the relationships between humans and the marine environment. And I also am an avid scuba diver. I'm a licensed open water scuba instructor, so a lot of my knowledge relating to this game comes from my experience as a diver as well. Brian 0:57 Oh, that's extra cool. Jason Wallace 0:59 Yes, you got hands on experience. Brian 1:01 That's right. You can talk to us about how when we use the divers to represent the actions. Emily 1:05 Oh, I have thoughts about that. Brian 1:06 I'll bet you do Jason Wallace 1:10 all right. And one thing we've started asking guests recently, do you have a favorite game you like to play? Speaker 1 1:15 It is really hard to pick a favorite game, because I There are so many different categories, but lately, I've been really into playing Ark Nova on Board Game Arena. So I don't have the physical game because I don't know that I have anyone who will play a game that long with me, but I like to play that one online Brian 1:32 Ark Nova is on our list for this season, so we've never played it. I'm looking forward to it. We don't have a copy of it yet, do we? Jason Wallace 1:37 No, so we'll probably be doing Board Game Arena too. Brian 1:40 Oh, okay, okay, Jason Wallace 1:41 all right. So we like to start off with a fun science fact. And Emily, we always give our guests first choice. Do you have some fun science fact that you know or that you picked up recently you'd like to share with our audience? Speaker 1 1:52 Sure, one thing that I came across as I was preparing for this podcast was thinking about the fact that actually fish, bony fish, like a salmon, for example, are more closely related to humans than they are to a shark. So we can talk a lot about that a little bit more later, if you'd like, Brian 2:06 Isn't it like, technically, phylogenetically, we are fish. If you there's no way to draw a grouping around fish that doesn't include us? Jason Wallace 2:13 The word fish is a pretty tough word to define, because of that phylogeny, they're not necessarily grouped together in a way that scientifically makes a lot of sense So Jason Wallace 2:22 yes, this is one of my questions for later. So we will get into that. Brian 2:25 Fantastic. So I found out a thing about flounders or flat fish. So these are in the order, you'll have to tell me how I said this wrong. It's Carangiformes. Unknown Speaker 2:35 I am not great with pronunciation, so it sounds right. Brian 2:37 Well, whatever, you can look at it on Wikipedia if I said ...
    Afficher plus Afficher moins
    56 min
  • S3E01 - Primates (Primate Evolution)
    Jan 28 2026
    #Primates #Evolution #GreenButteryflyGames #Conservation #BoardGames #Science Summary Happy 2026, everyone! To celebrate Darwin Day (February 12th), we have a special 90-minute episode with Will and David from the Common Descent Podcast to talk all about Primates! We'll cover the new game by Green Butterfly Games, all six clades of primates it showcases, and tons of other fun facts about us an our arboreal cousins, like how monkeys rafted from Africa to South America and why Aye-ayes are the best nose-pickers. So grab a banana, build a nest, and settle in for a lively discussion of Primates. Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intros00:02:07 - Dung Beetles and Human Endurance00:11:42 - Game Overview00:21:23 - Primate History00:33:00 - Different Primate Groups00:51:17 - Humans in the Game00:57:17 - Representation through Game Mechanics01:07:36 - Picking Nits01:13:09 - Final Grades01:21:55 - Wrap-up Links Primates (Green Butterfly Games)The Common Descent PodcastDung beetles evolving to eat meat (Science.org)Limits of human endurance (Nature.com)An aye-aye picking its nose (YouTube) When the Earth was Green, by Riley Black (Macmillan Publishers)Pitchstorm and Fate of the Nostromo (Board Game Geek) 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 Wallace 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 0:12 Today, we're going to discuss primates by green butterfly games. Hey, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian. This is Jason. And wait, we've got some other people here. Brian 0:26 Will and David, you're back! Will 0:27 We're back. David 0:28 Can't get rid of us, Brian 0:30 no. Well, not that we would want to actually, this whole reason that this entire episode happened is actually your fault, so please explain yourself. David 0:38 Oh, that's true. We this game was sent to us. We were sent it as a gift from one of our listeners, yeah, oh, we should have, we should have looked up who it was that sent it to us. That would have been really good to get the name. Jason Wallace 0:48 Thank you, anonymous. Listener of another podcast, Brian 0:54 common descent. Listener, whoever you are, thank you and make yourself known. You guys got a game, and you said, Well, we know some people who want to play, who like to play science games, and you approached us, which is totally different, because that's not how this works around here. We usually have to chase people down. David 1:08 We got the gift. I think it, I think we received it shortly after the last time we recorded with you guys. Brian 1:15 Oh, wow. David 1:16 And it was a really cool because it's the it's a perfect game for your podcast? Brian 1:22 Absolutely. David 1:24 We thought it would be super fun, and so, yeah, it was one of the first things we did is we said, hey, do you guys want to play this you want to come back and play this game with us? Brian 1:31 Yep, and we did, and it was fun. And we even did it the weekend of the museum meetup at Fernbank, which, again, is going to date this episode, but whatever, that's fine. We're releasing this episode that will also be our episode that's closest to Darwin Day. So it's also a good game for Darwin Day. So I'm excited to talk about this game. It has a huge amount of science content, and I'm excited about the conversation we're going to get to have about primates and how they're weird. But before we get into that, why don't we do a little bit of science banter? Anything you guys would like to talk about? Will 1:58 One that's on my mind because I literally just finished taking notes on it for one of our news sections, which will come out before this. So it won't be, I won't be spoiling our news. There was a study on dung beetles that have evolved to be necrophageous. So eating dead bodies, Brian 2:16 Did they roll them up into little balls? Will 2:18 Yeah. And this is a thing that I was aware of. We talked about this in the decomposing episode, there are beetles that basically roll up a bit of a meatball and roll it away, bury it and let their young feet off of it, Brian 2:30 okay, Will 2:30 instead of dung, yeah, meatballs. Brian 2:33 That's a different meaning of meatball. Yep. Will 2:37 And there was, there's a group of dung beetles that have evolved to do this, and they studied it by finding those underground Brian 2:48 meat? Will 2:48 open like like like burrows that they used to there are Ichnofossils...
    Afficher plus Afficher moins
    1 h et 27 min
  • S2E10.1 - John Coveyou (Interview)
    Dec 17 2025
    #GeniusGames #STEMEducation #SciComm #JohnCoveyou #BoardGames #Science We've done several episodes on games from Genius Games (Cytosis, Periodic, Genotype), and now we get to speak to the man behind it all: John Coveyou, founder and CEO of Genius Games. John graciously sat down with us to talk about the beginning of Genius Games, the stigma of "educational" games, the challenges and joys of STEM game design, and some of his favorite non-Genius games to play. So sit back and enjoy this conversation with the man who makes our job easy, John Coveyou. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions01:55 History of John and Genius Games07:50 Designing Educational Games13:19 Balancing Fun and Realism20:54 Most Challenging Games to Design29:55 Upcoming Offerings36:36 Favorite (Non-Genius) Games38:23 Wrap-Up Links Genius Games website 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. Splash images courtesy of Genius Games. 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 Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason 0:07 Today we're talking with John Coveyou, CEO and founder of genius games. Brian 0:16 Hey everybody. Welcome to a creator interview. I'm Brian. Jason 0:19 This is Jason, Brian 0:20 and joining us is John Coveyou from genius games, John, can you introduce yourself? John 0:26 Sure, yeah, I'm the owner of genius games. I've owned it since about 2011 and we make science accurate board games and jigsaw puzzles for the hobby market. Brian 0:38 Those are very cool and very popular. I think I like the the frog. One in particular is very good. John 0:44 You dissect a frog in a lot of public school science classes, so we want to make sure we threw that one in there. Brian 0:49 I don't think I did a frog. Did you ever do a frog? John 0:52 I did. I think it was 10th grade biology. Jason 0:55 I don't remember if I ever dissected a frog. I did do a fetal pig. Brian 0:59 I remember we did a heart one time and that actually, like, screwed me up for a long time. John 1:03 Yeah, I don't want to know what this stuff looks like inside of my body. Let me just move on. Brian 1:10 Fair enough. We're really excited to be able to get you on to talk to us today. Our whole reason for existence is to talk about board games and science and genius games. As you can imagine, we have done many of your games before. We've done cytosis and periodic. We did genotype. We have more games planned in the future. We're going to be doing cellulose and probably whatever else comes down the pipe. Eventually. I'm sure we'll, we'll touch on most, if not all, of the games in the genius library. John 1:37 Well, that's great, because those are two of my favorite things, science and board gaming and both have, I mean, honestly, had a dramatic impact on my life in many ways. I mean, I run a company that combines those two, but the impact goes much deeper than that. So I'm very excited to talk about both of those things and how they came together. Could you Jason 1:55 give us a bit of your background there? Because this is not necessarily a logical place to end up. At the intersection of science and board game. Your company basically lives in the space of making what I call hard science games, games where they're not just inspired by science, but they try to portray it accurately and faithfully. What brought you to that place? John 2:13 Yeah, and you know, it's a long, windy story, but I will try and summarize it as quick as possible. I think when you see a lot of games out there in the marketplace and you see, you know, a science-based game or a STEM-based game, what you're looking at is a product someone wanted to create, to just generate money. I did not arrive at the place of creating a product. I arrived. I mean, I fell in love with the sciences, and also loved board gaming, and those two things kind of randomly came together. So a little bit about my background in the sciences. After high school, I joined the military. I was in the military for eight years total, but only three of it was on active duty. I spent about a year and a half in Iraq in Mosul and Samara. And while I was there, I was enrolled in some university classes, and one was a chemistry class. And reading through I had, I got a lot of time to read through that chemistry textbook, and some other textbooks I had chemistry and some in physics, I think I was taking at the same time, because of the the stressful environment that I was in studying sciences actually became very therapeutic for me, like ...
    Afficher plus Afficher moins
    40 min
  • S2E10 - Nature (Evolution redux)
    Nov 26 2025
    #NatureGame #NorthStarGames #Evolution #Ecology #Predators #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Summary Welcome to Nature, the next evolution of Evolution! We're joined once again by Dr. Thiago Moreira to talk about this reimagining of a popular game, including covering a lot of evolutionary territory we couldn't last time. We'll talk about why everything isn't actually turning into crabs, why anteater-ification needs to be a word, how humans shape evolution from moths to elephants, what exactly a species is and where they come from, and why there's no such thing as "more evolved" creatures, (at least among anything still alive). Timestamps 00:00 Introductions02:14 Better DNA preservation05:00 Bird-hunting tortoise06:54 Basics of Nature16:23 Evolution in a nutshell18:30 Convergent evolution27:42 Human-induced evolution34:22 Species and speciation40:52 Evolution toward simplicity45:49 Final grades Links Nature Web Site (North Star Games) Preserving DNA with EDTA (Phys.org) Video of tortoise hunting a bird (YouTube) 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 science behind some of your favorite games. Jason 0:10 Today, we will be talking about nature by North Star games. Hey everyone, welcome back. This is Jason. Brian 0:18 This is Brian. Thiago 0:19 I'm Thiago Jason 0:20 again, Thiago, so y'all may remember Tiago Moreira from our episode on evolution back in season one. He is back with us today to talk about nature, which is the next evolution of evolution. So Thiago, can you give our listeners a quick refresh on who you are and what your background is? Thiago 0:38 Hi, of course. My name is Thiago Moreira, I'm a assistant professor of honors and biology at George Washington University in Washington, DC. I do have a background in zoology, and my PhD was in evolutionary biology, and my object of studies are spiders. Brian 0:54 So Tiago has the questionable honor of being our first returning guest. Jason 1:00 All right, we're going to assume that is a high honor. Thiago 1:03 I consider an honor. Jason 1:05 And Tiago, I don't know if we asked you this the first time, but we're making it a habit to ask our guests what their favorite game is. What's your favorite game? Thiago 1:13 Tabletop game? Jason 1:14 Sure. Brian 1:14 Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be. Thiago 1:17 I get into the habit of like playing tabletop games, like board games later. So like, as a gamer, my favorite was always role playing games. And I'm from Brazil, and in Brazil at the time that I was a kid, we didn't have DND officially there, so we have others. So like, I play some very old school ones, but I guess the one that marked my teenage years and young adult years more was like Vampire the Masquerade. Jason 1:43 Oh, okay, I never played that one, but I did play several other of white wolf's Orpheus is my personal favorite. Thiago 1:49 Okay, Brian 1:50 so you were sort of in the sort of 90s renaissance of indie tabletop roleplay Thiago 1:54 kind of, yeah. Jason 1:56 So did you like, have cape and fangs and all that sort of stuff? Thiago 2:01 I never do the the live action was, it's always tabletop, like, always rolling dice and like, that's it. Brian 2:07 That seems like a shame, Tiago, because I think you'd make a pretty good vampire. Thiago 2:12 I tried once. Didn't work. Brian 2:13 Okay, Jason 2:14 well, let's move on to our fun science fact. Tiago, as our guest, you get to go first. What do you have for us from the world of science. Thiago 2:21 So I got this news the other day, like and like something that is probably going to be very influential in what I do. I'm a systematic person, so I do work with systematics, trying to uncover the tree of life. And we use a lot of molecular data. And this was this news from, apparently, people in Northwestern University, they found something that actually preserves DNA better than actually what we use currently, which is ethanol. So apparently when they use EDTA, which is a food preserver, it actually preserved the DNA samples more efficiently than actually ethanol, Brian 2:57 just like a suspension, like a solution of EDTA? Thiago 3:00 Yeah, they made a kind of solution to it. And actually, they found this by accident, apparently. So they just got a sample that fell in there, like, and apparently it works. Apparently it says here that, like, they got some samples from fish in ddta, ...
    Afficher plus Afficher moins
    50 min
  • S2E09 - Periodic (the Periodic Table)
    Oct 29 2025
    #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 - Introductions02:52 - Molybdenum poisoning & glowing plants12:39 - Basics of Periodic19:14 - What is the Periodic Table?32:35 - Why are some elements weird?39:53 - Not just electrons55:16 - Nitpick corner1:00:37 - 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's an interesting history that that kind of comes about. Brian 2:25 Well, very cool. Let's see. So, so we're here to talk about the game periodic by genius games. This is another in our genius games roster, which I figure eventually we'll be working our way through all of the genius games games at some point or another. But this is our second chemistry game. So we're excited to talk about it, but really, this game is about the periodic table specifically, which is very cool, and I definitely have questions, so I'm excited to have somebody here to to give answers. But why don't we start with our science banter topic? So what have we learned or found studies something interesting in the world of science today. So we usually let our guests go first if they've got something, if not, Jason has something queued up Raychelle 3:08 well, as a forensic scientist, I will say I spent a lot of time kind of in crime. I mean, hey, Okay, Brian 3:17 makes sense. ...
    Afficher plus Afficher moins
    1 h et 8 min
  • S2E08 - Daybreak (Climate Change)
    Sep 24 2025
    #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...
    Afficher plus Afficher moins
    1 h et 15 min
  • S2E07 - Genotype (Genetics)
    Aug 27 2025
    #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 ...
    Afficher plus Afficher moins
    54 min
  • S2E06 - Atiwa (Fruit bats)
    Jul 30 2025
    #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...
    Afficher plus Afficher moins
    55 min