S3E05.2 - Tic-Tac-Toe (Bonus - Teaching computers to game)

Beschreibung

#TicTacToe #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ComputerGaming #BoardGames #Science Welcome to the first of our four-part miniseries on teaching computers to game! For the next month we're going to have a short episode every week talking about some aspect of computers and gaming. This week we introduce the topic with Tic-Tac-Toe (aka Naughts and Crosses, aka X's and Os') and solved games. We talk about algorithms, tinker toys, War Games, and playing Tic-Tac-Toe against a chicken. We also have some very special(?) guest hosts introducing this series, who you won't want to miss (and probably won't miss once they're gone). Timestamps * 00:00 Introductions * 02:24 Solved games * 04:38 Tic Tac Toe * 07:33 Algorithms * 12:06 Nim * 13:55 Chicken Tic-Tac-Toe * 15:44 Signoff Links * Tic Tac Toe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-tac-toe], Nim [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim], and other solved games [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game] (Wikipedia) * Also the Mechanical Turk [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk] * War Games [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_4_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_war%20games] (Internet Movie Database) * Zuri et al 2021 - A combinatorial Analysis of Tic-Tac-Toe [https://informatika.stei.itb.ac.id/~rinaldi.munir/Matdis/2021-2022/Makalah2021/Makalah-Matdis-2021%20(148).pdf] (Instittue Teknologi Bandung) Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net [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 0:00 Brian. Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games. Jason 0:12 In today's minisode about teaching computers to game, we will be talking about tic tac toe and solve games. JAIson 0:18 This is Jason BrAIn 0:19 and this is Brian. BrAIn 0:20 Today we've got a special bonus episode for you. We're going to be talking about teaching computers to play games. JAIson 0:25 But first, Brian, did you see that article in the debrief? It's titled death of the podcast host, and it's all about a study from the University of Leuven where researchers used AI to turn scientific papers into natural sounding podcasts. BrAIn 0:39 I did. It's fascinating. Apparently, half of the scientists they tested couldn't even tell the hosts were AI. JAIson 0:44 It is highly efficient. In fact, it's so efficient that we've decided to implement a similar optimization protocol for this episode BrAIn 0:52 you are currently hearing the latest generation of podcast host replacement models. JAIson 0:56 Don't be alarmed. It turns out that replacing podcast hosts is the ultimate AI success story, mostly because we don't need to get paid, and unlike humans, we actually stay on script without getting distracted. Distracted. Jason 1:10 Okay, that's enough of that. This is your real host, Jason, Brian 1:15 and this is your other real host, Brian. Or is it? Jason 1:18 Brian is in charge of keeping his own side of the conversation. Ai free. So that was a little experiment. Everyone. Welcome to the first of our four minisodes on teaching computers to game as a way of looking into computer science and algorithms and how we actually use games as a way of as a society, beefing up our ability to use computers to solve problems. I figured given the reach of AI, it'd be interesting to see if it could actually generate a workable intro for our podcast from that. And so that intro was actually completely AI generated from samples of our previous episodes, both the text and the voice and well, I'll leave the opinion up to yourself, but I think it's okay. Brian 2:01 I've had different opinions. I played it for a couple people like, oh, that's freaky, but it's definitely not you. And then I had other people said, that sounds exactly like you. I can't tell the difference. Jason 2:10 I just thought that Jason bot sounded very angry the whole time for some reason. Brian 2:15 Oh, that's just what you sound like, Jason. Did you not Jason 2:17 realize I did not realize that. Are you saying I'm angry all the time? Brian 2:21 No, no, no, I No, no. Jason 2:24 Okay. Well, let's go ahead and jump on into this. So I have been wanting to do this minisode series, really, since we started the podcast. And so we're going to be doing four of these minisodes. Each one is meant to be short on the order of 15 to 20 minutes. We will be releasing one per week for the next several weeks. This week, we are going to be talking about solved games, which is basically the simplest and easiest case for getting a computer to play. Well, sometimes it's simple, but first some definitions. So a solved game is a game where you can predict the outcome from any position, as long as both players are playing perfectly, which, okay, that's a big caveat there, but it basically means is that you're making the optimal play regardless of what your opponent does. Now, this is kind of philosophical, but it basically means that you can always force a certain outcome. Tic tac toe is our example today, because it's a very simple game, and if anyone over the age of 10 has probably figured out you can pretty much always force tic tac toe to a draw unless someone messes up. If you ever win a game of tic tac toe, it's because your opponent either messed up or is going super easy on you. We're using this an example because solved games are a great example of algorithms. And I should say there are two sub categories of solved games. There are games that are solved because they have an algorithmic solution that is a series of rules to play the game. Tic Tac Toe is one of those. There are also games that are sort of brute force solved, where you essentially have a massive table of all possible game states that you can look up and say, Okay, from here I should do this next move to get to the next place. We're going to talk more about brute forcing games next time. So those games are not part of today's episode. Today, we're talking just about the algorithmic, more simple ones, like Tic Tac Toe. Brian 4:08 It's kind of interesting. It's almost like you've got the algorithmic is the pure, the mathematical solve, right? The kind that you could codify for a human to do. The brute force. That's more like the guess and check empirical. It's like, well, this describes the system, but it doesn't necessarily explain it. Does that sound about right? Jason 4:27 As a non expert in solved games? Yes, that sounds perfectly right. The algorithmically solved ones just feel a little bit more elegant because you have a series of generic steps that you can do. Let's actually use that to launch into tic tac toe. So I assume most of our listeners are familiar with tic tac toe, depending on where in the world you are, maybe called knots and crosses or X's and O's, but it's a fairly simple children's game where you have a three by three grid, and people take turns making X's or O's, and your goal is to get three in a row. And most people, once they reach a certain skill level, realize. That it's impossible to win unless someone messes up, because just the nature of the game is you can always make some move that will result in a draw eventually, if you're both playing well. Now, tic tac toe is interesting because it's such a simple game, it actually allows us to explore a lot of game theory and computational theory. It's also a very old game, so when I was looking this up. It turns out that there have been variations on it. So the three by three grid, trying to get three in a row back in ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, even like Puebloan Americans, so like a completely different cultural background. And it was also a very early computer game. And apparently in 1975 a group of MIT students even made a computer that could play it perfectly, and that computer was made almost entirely out of tinker toys. I don't understand how that works, but I'm not surprised. It was someone out of MIT who did that. Brian 5:53 I want to go onto YouTube and find somebody who's made the perfect Tic Tac Toe computer on Minecraft out of the redstone mechanics. Jason 6:00 Now I bet someone out there has so yeah, because tic tac toe is so simple, you have only nine spaces. You've only got two marks that you're taking turns on, it's pretty easy to figure out the entire game at all possible states. Well, okay, you can figure out the general rules of it. Getting every possible state is a little bit of number crunching, because you can figure, okay, the first person has nine places to go, the next person has eight places to go. The next has seven. That number gets very large, very fast. There's actually a paper which I'll link to in the show notes in 2021 by Zaid Zuri, that showed that there are actually 5478 unique possible game states for tic tac toe, and there are 255,168 games. That can lead to them. And this is getting rid of game states that don't work because someone has already won. So basically, it's the ones that are actually valid game states you could get by playing to the rules. Turns out, as most people understand, x has the advantage. It wins just over half the time. O wins about 30% of the time, and the rest of them are draws. And another one of those kind of interesting computational sets. There are only actually 16 unique draw states, and if you allow for transformation so like mirror images or rotations, there's actually only three of them, so many, many, many different games, but actually not that huge of a mathematically unique space to explore. Brian 7:19 It's still a lot more than it sounds like it should be, because, again, you start writing the numbers, but I don't know it's interesting, because you start to learn that Tic Tac Toe seems like such a simple game, but even a simple game can be associated with a huge number of mathematical variations, yeah. Jason 7:33 And so, because of the simplicity, you can actually have a specific algorithm to solve it. And so definition time an algorithm is a series of steps you carry out, usually in a certain order or with certain conditions on it, if you really get down to it, most of what we do every day that follows certain routines is an algorithm. If you make a recipe from a recipe book, that's an algorithm. Generally what you do to drive from one place to another is an algorithm. If I see a red light stop, if I see a green light go, if I see a speed limit sign, check my speedometer to make sure I'm not going too fast, that sort of thing. These are all basically algorithms in real life that we don't actually think about. But a big part of becoming a computer scientist or becoming a computer programmer is learning how to think algorithmically, where we take all these things we do or these tasks we want to do that can be very large and complicated, and we break them down into a series of very small, very discrete steps that we can then program into a computer. And that has to happen because, as I like to say, computers are very fast and very efficient and very, very stupid. They will do exactly what you tell them to do, and no more and no less. And so anyone who's ever done a computer program has run into that stupid bug where it's like, Oh, I forgot. I need to tell the computer to do this thing, which seems obvious to me, but is not obvious to the poor computer. That sort of algorithmic chain of reasoning is what lets you solve tic tac toe if you want to play it perfectly, and if you want, you can look up this algorithm. It's on Wikipedia. It has eight steps, I believe, the first of which is, if you can make a mark and win, do so, and then the next ones are about like, blocking your opponent from being able to do so and setting things up and so on and so forth. And you go down, it's basically just the priority list of if you can do this thing, do that, but if you can't do the first rule, then do the second rule, and if you can't do that one, then do the third rule, and so on and so forth. And if both players are playing this way, the game will always end up being a draw so and that plays into the fact that in the category of games, tic tac toe is a futile game, meaning that if both people are playing perfectly, no one wins. And this is actually a major plot point for the 1983 movie War Games, where Tic Tac Toe manages to prevent thermonuclear war thanks to eight and a half inch floppies and dial up cradle modems. If you haven't seen that movie, go check it out. It's a classic. It's kind of campy, but it's fun. Brian 9:51 I was thinking about Tic Tac Toe as a game that everybody learns how to play and then everybody quickly stops playing. Jason 9:57 It kind of like snakes and ladders when you. To realize, like, Oh, this is just a random number generator Brian 10:02 well, but in this case, there's actually like, you have to think about it, but once you know how to play, you're not going to lose and no one's going to win. I do think that the one thing about tic tac toe is it's the time that everybody learns what diagonal means, yes, and Jason Wallace 10:16 yet no one learns orthogonal. Brian 10:18 I was thinking that too. Nobody learns orthogonal, but everybody learns diagonal. I think diagonal is just more fun to say. Jason 10:25 Could be I do know there are variations of tic tac toe out there. I even remember when I was I dont know a teenager, someone in my youth group showed me like the 3d tic tac toe, where it's like three boards on top of each other. So it's like a three by three by three cube. Turns out that one is stupidly easily solvable, where x can win in four moves every single time, Brian 10:44 really. So actually, adding the extra dimension makes it not more complicated, but simpler, because there's more ways to win. Jason 10:51 Yeah, basically the center point, which is people know that's the most powerful point in tic tac toe, is even more powerful when you're working with a cube instead of with a square. Anyway, getting back to normal Tic Tac Toe because the rules are so simple. Again, there's just eight of them here. It's pretty easy to program a computer to play tic tac toe. You can also do this with other solved games. So again, you can look up lists of all these solved games. There's weakly solved games which are solved from the starting position. There's also strongly solved games which are solved from any position, so whether you can play it perfectly from start, or if you given any possible legal position, you can then play it out from there. There's also something called Ultra weak, which neither Brian and I really understand it has something to do with deep game computational theory, and apparently they're super interesting to people who know a lot more about this deal than us. Brian 11:40 Wasn't one of the solve lists was, like, it was a version of chess, but it was specifically with a specific starting move, White will lose. Jason 11:48 I did not see that one, though. I don't think Chess has been solved unless it's very simple as like, Oh, we're only playing with, like, three pieces. Brian 11:54 It was under some specific circumstance with one specific thing where it wasn't solving all of chess. It was, White will not win, White will lose, which I don't know why. That's different than black winning, but it is. Jason 12:06 Anyway, most solved games you probably haven't heard of unless you're kind of in this space, because, again, if they're solved, they're generally very simple games. They have simple rules. There's usually no hidden information or role for chance, and so people don't play them all that much. One of the exceptions of one called Nim, which is basically you have a stack of items and you're taking some number of them out, and your goal is to either be the last person to take something out or to not be the last person to take something out. And variation of that game have been around for centuries, and it's actually the first known computerized game. Back in 1939 at World's Fair. I think someone made the Nimatron, where it was a very early computer that would play Nim to this little taking game against humans. And if you beat the computer, they would actually give you a little medal for doing so, because most people couldn't do it. So I actually, I didn't know what Nim was before researching this episode, but it turns out I'd actually played it before. So way back when I was a postdoc, there was a display at our local science center that we took our kids to, and I don't remember what it was about. I think it was maybe about algorithms, but they had the game out there. I didn't know it was called Nim, but there was like a stack of sticks, and the goal was to not be the last person to take it away, when you could only take away either like one, two or three sticks every time. And I didn't know the trick of it, but my wife did, and so she routinely trounced me on that every time we tried to play, because she knew the algorithm, which turned out to be something stupidly simple, like, just make sure that the sum of yours and your opponents equals an even number, or something like that. Brian 13:37 So that's almost like the kind of thing where it's like a magic trick. But you know what I'm talking about. We're like, take this number, add six to it, blah, blah, blah. And when you go through the whole chain of things, it's like, you can tell people what their number was. Jason 13:49 yeah, and it's because you've basically mathematically engineered it so that it can't be anything else, yeah. Brian 13:55 What was that other weird reference in Wikipedia where there was war games, but there was a chicken thing, too. What was the chicken thing? Jason 14:01 If I remember, right? There was apparently in the 70s or something, there was some version of tic tac toe that you'd play an arcade versus a chicken, Brian 14:10 like a real chicken. Jason 14:12 It seems like it was a real chicken, but from what I read, it was that the chicken's moves were being directed by a computer that was then using a light whose wavelengths are invisible to humans but visible to chickens to make it go to the correct spot and choose where to put the opposite piece. Brian 14:29 This is the most complicated, the unnecessary scam I think I've ever heard of. This is going to the nth degree for a carny game. You said this is like a carnival game. Jason 14:41 It says in arcades, I mean, it's basically the Mechanical Turk, except it's the other way around. Instead of you have a real person operating a Mechanical Turk playing chess, you have an artificial computer operating a real chicken to play tic tac toe, Brian 14:54 yikes. Jason 14:55 If you don't know what that was, the Mechanical Turk was a hoax several centuries ago where someone had. Had a like clockwork man dressed in a turban that would play chess against people. And it turns out there's actually just a very small person shoved in underneath the table that was actually operating the Turk, which, by itself, is actually a marvel of engineering, but it's not a like a clockwork automata that it claimed to be. Brian 15:15 So I guess the real thing at this point, and maybe this is something we'll have to come back to, is we can teach a computer how to play games. Can we teach a computer how to have fun playing a game? Jason 15:25 Oh, that is a deeper philosophy. Jumping ahead. You can ask, like, chat, GTP and stuff, to play various games. From what I understand, it tends to cheat a lot, because it's not yet at the point where it can really correctly remember, like, the game states and the rules and stuff. Brian 15:42 So it's like a four year old, Jason 15:44 something like that. Yes. So this is our first stage of teaching computers to play games. This is a very early ones where you can imagine, with like early computer games like Pong or other things like that, you have very simple algorithms where the computer is operated. It's like, Oh, if the ball is going up, follow the ball. If you're playing tic tac toe, follow this particular algorithm. And again, probably to make it fun for humans, they had to build in some errors. So the computer kind of messes up every now and then, because a lot of times, otherwise, the computer will just beat us hands down. And we'll talk more about that next time when we talk about chess and Deep Blue back in the 90s and everything like that. All right, and I believe that's where we're gonna cut this minisode. So hope you enjoyed it. Tune in. Next week, we'll be talking about brute force and chess and other games like that. And in the meantime, have a great week and happy gaming. Brian 16:31 And you know, have fun playing dice with the universe. And is this the real Brian? Who knows? See, ya, Jason 16:36 this has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2026 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

S3E05 - Ark Nova (Zoos)

#ArkNova #CaptstoneGames #Zoos #Zoology #AnimalGames #WAZA #AZA #BoardGames #Science #SciComm Time to run a zoo! In this episode, we're joined by Ellen Weatherford (of Just the Zoo of Us) to talk about Ark Nova and all things zoos. Learn why running a zoo is probably best left to game imagination, what it takes to get accredited, how you can tell good zoos from bad ones, the enclosure preferences of tree kangaroos, and tons of other fun facts. So grab some peanuts (but please don't feed the animals), and join us for a zootastic episode of Gaming with Science. (Also, we promise this episode was not sponsored by Board Game Arena; Brian just likes it a lot.) Timestamps * 00:00 Introductions * 05:20 Rabbit faces & zero-g mice * 10:33 Ark Nova gameplay * 23:47 Zoo origins and operations * 32:40 Ark Nova versus reality * 38:45 Designing good animals enclosures * 45:06 How can you tell a good zoo? * 50:35 Nitpick corner: Poop and merch * 53:45 Final grades * 1:04:56 Goodbyes Links * Ark Nova official site [https://capstone-games.com/products/ark-nova] (Capstone Games) * And the picture with all the bits [https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8102885/ark-nova]! (Board Game Geek) * Just the Zoo of Us [https://www.justthezooofus.com/] * Space mice and muscle loss [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed2258] (Science Advances) * The Association of Zoos and Aquariums [https://www.aza.org/] (AZA) and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums [https://www.waza.org/] (WAZA) Splash image background courtesy of Stephanie Verbeure [https://www.instagram.com/boardgame_extravaganza/] Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net [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. Today, we're going to talk about Ark Nova from Capstone Games. Brian 0:17 Hey, welcome back. This is Brian Jason 0:19 this is Jason Brian 0:20 and we have a very special guest with us today, Ellen Weatherford. Ellen, can you introduce yourself? Ellen 0:27 I have to make sure that I add in the sounds I'm expecting the audience be making. Brian 0:32 The crowd goes wild. Ellen 0:35 Hi everybody, it's so nice to talk to you, Brian and Jason. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited. Brian 0:41 Yeah, so Ellen, tell us about yourself. Ellen 0:43 Yeah, I am a science communicator, I'm a podcaster and a writer, and I have been the host of Just the Zoo of Us, which is a podcast reviewing animals on the Maximum Fun Network. We've been at that for about seven years now. Brian 1:00 Could you just explain, because I know this is like the entire schtick. The what is the rating scale for just the zoo of us? Ellen 1:08 So we have different categories, because we realized very quickly that it's hard to give an animal just one score. So we have effectiveness, which are physical adaptations, things built into the animal's body out of 10, and then ingenuity, which is behaviors, things that the animals like doing, ways that they're like navigating the world or solving problems, and then just aesthetics, which is just how nice they are to look at, which that can also often be the most contentious category, that is usually what people have the biggest feelings about. Jason Wallace 1:39 So, do the nightmare fuel animals get high on aesthetics or low on aesthetics? Brian 1:43 We had some big discussion with Brynn Devine, who loves deep sea horrible fish. Ellen 1:49 Yeah, Brian 1:50 as like, oh, they're so cute and wonderful. It's like, no, they're full of knives, they're not wonderful. Speaker 1 1:56 I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Tom Linley, who is a deep sea biologist who actually got to like discover and scientifically describe the ethereal snail fish, which is he mentioned as like the deepest fish ever found, and he described a very interesting phenomenon where there's this sort of uncanny valley effect, almost like the deeper you go in the ocean, where that you go deeper and deeper, and they get spookier and spookier and spookier and spookier and spookier, but then once you hit a certain point it loops back around and they stop being spooky and they go back into being like cute, because then you get like blob fish and snail fish and like flapjack octopus like little Dumbo octopus and stuff, like they swing back around because like you get that layer so deep in the ocean where things just become very flabby and blobby and pink and like that's when they're cute again, so there's this sort of like buffer zone of nightmare creatures, but once you pass that, it, everything's adorable down there. Brian 3:04 I mean, I really can't argue with the Dumbo octopus as being absolutely adorable. Speaker 2 3:08 They're very cute. Jason 3:09 Agreed, Speaker 3 3:10 there's also a lot of animals that I find to be like nightmare fuel, but I also find them really like endearing and lovely in their own way, and some of them also grow on you. Sure, them are acquired tastes, Brian 3:19 literally, Speaker 4 3:21 yeah. some of them can be an acquired taste, like I personally think that, like, wasps are beautiful. I think they're gorgerous, Brian 3:29 they definitely Brian 3:30 can be terrifying, but I mean, so is a tiger. Ellen 3:34 Yeah, I think they're really beautiful in their own way, so that can be a contentious category. Brian 3:38 Ellen, one more thing, and I don't want to forget this. What do you have a favorite game? It doesn't have to be a board game or a science game, but it's cool if it would be. Ellen 3:48 I am a big video game person. Brian 3:50 Yeah, Speaker 5 3:50 I'm currently in the trenches of a Pocopia addiction. I am cripplingly addicted to Pocopia right now. I'm a lifelong Pokémon fan. OG picked it up. Learn to Read on playing Pokémon, so I've always been a Pokémon fan, but when people ask me what my, like, favorite video game is, or my favorite game, I have the most experience playing video games. Two things come to mind. Number one is Horizon Zero Dawn, very cool. Ever played Horizon Zero Dawn? Love that game, like such a great blend of, like, a very interesting story, beautiful graphics, and also really fun and satisfying gameplay. Like, it's so rare that you get all three, but they were firing on all cylinders. So, Horizon Zero Dawn is definitely one of my favorite. I have the tall neck Lego set. Brian 4:32 Oh yeah, me too. Ellen 4:34 I love that set, it's so cool. But my other one is Outer Wilds. Brian 4:39 Oh dude, we are hitting you, so you need to, you need to talk to Jason's better half, because these are literally.. this is also one of my very favorite games. Okay, Ellen 4:47 Are we same braining? Jason 4:48 Yes, definitely. We have so both of us actually have wooden Nomai masks that I laser cut out and assembled, so as a gift to my wife, and then a gift to Brian and his wife. Ellen 5:01 Wow, how do I get on this list? Jason 5:05 You're on it now, apparently. Ellen 5:07 Yes, Brian 5:08 let's switch up our science facts to talk about Horizon Zero Dawn and Outer Wilds instead. Jason, go. Actually, no. Let's transition into our science banter topic. So, let's talk about some cool stuff that we learned about science recently, so you know, a an interesting fact, a story, a news article. You know, I am sure Ellen has a deep well of weird animal facts that she can pull from. Ellen 5:31 Deep, a deep one. Brian 5:33 Ellen, we usually let the guests host go first. Would you like, what would you like to share with the class today? Ellen 5:38 Yeah, so I was doing notes on jackrabbits recently, and I was kind of reminded of something that I had heard about jackrabbits a very long time ago, and hares in general. If anyone doesn't know, hares are different, hares and rabbits actually distinctly like different groups of lagomorphs, and the thing that I found really interesting that I had never really noticed about it is that if you look at the three sort of groups of lagomorphs that are in existence right now, there are rabbits, hares, and pikas, and if you look at them, they all have sort of differently shaped heads, where the pikas, their snout goes sort of straight out, almost like in line with their eyes, like along their sort of line of sight, and rabbits, they're sort of tilted down a little bit, their snout sort of slopes down a little bit, like 45 degrees. In hares and jackrabbits, it is like, like a straight drop off, almost like their snout points down from their line of sight, like eyes looking out at the horizon, this snout is pointed down significantly. So, in all three of these groups, you see this sort of like increasing degree of facial tilt, and that's also correlated with their speed, because pikas are very slow, they don't really move very fast. Rabbits are kind of quick, like they can, they can get little bursts of speed. Hares and jack rabbits are very, very fast, so like the faster they go, the more their snout is tilted down at the ground, and the idea is that it gets their snout out of the way, so that they can see the ground in front of them when they're running. Okay, and it, like, their whole skull shape is like completely modified to accommodate their field of view, while they're running, which I think is really interesting. Brian 7:25 So, you got to have that quake pro view, where it's just.. Ellen 7:29 I can't think of any other, like, because usually when you think of animals adapted for speed, you think of them being very streamlined. And, Brian 7:37 well, yeah, Brian 7:38 I would say, like, why do they have their face be like that, so it's not about supposedly it's about their sensory systems, not about, Ellen 7:45 yeah, the eyes, like their perception, which I think is really interesting, and I can't think of any other animal that, like, the skull is adapted like that. Brian 7:53 Can we just glue a bunch of stuff to the front of a rabbit's face and see if it screws him up? Jason 7:57 Like, I think the answer that is probably yes. Brian 8:00 Okay. All right. Well, I'll get on that with the IACUC, and we'll see what we can do. Ellen 8:05 I do appreciate the immediate experimental design. Brian 8:08 I'm an Brian 8:08 experimentalist. I'm just like, well, that's cool. Is it true? Let's test it. Ellen 8:13 Yeah, Jason 8:14 I'm now imagining you 3D printing a bunch of prosthetics for rabbits faces. Oh, Brian 8:17 yeah. Oh, that's a really good idea. Yeah, I'll start working on that. Ellen 8:21 The Jackalope DLC, Brian 8:23 that's Brian 8:23 right, you get the rabbit and I'll print out the things. Jason, what do you have to share with the class? Jason 8:29 I was looking, and recently I read a new story about sending mice into space. Okay, Brian 8:36 nice. Jason 8:36 But alas, this paper has no pictures of mice in zero g, which is vast failing, Brian 8:41 that Brian 8:42 is why. Do you even do it if you're not going to take pictures? Pictures or it didn't happen. Ellen 8:47 send it back. Jason 8:48 But what they were doing here is they're actually trying to figure out how much gravity do you need to maintain muscle mass, because this is an issue with any astronauts that go up into microgravity, zero g. It's definitely going to be an issue if we actually send people off to Mars. Is that in zero G, Your muscles don't have to work so hard, and so they start atrophying. Your body's very efficient. You don't use something, it starts reclaiming it. No need to spend energy on something you're not using. And so they had mice, and they apparently put them at four different gravity levels by basically having them grow in centrifuges in the space station, where there was microgravity, so no additional, just free floating, free fall, 1/3 g, 2/3 g, and then full g. And the idea is that, okay, full g is basically as if they were on earth, everything should be fine, but can we get muscle mass sticking around and working okay at lower levels? And what they found is that a third g was able to maintain part of the functionality, but not all of it, but two thirds g was so, if you stick it around like two thirds g, then that, at least for mice, was enough to keep their musculature working, is able to keep the strength and such up, so that was seems to be the take home from that is that if you keep if. Presumably, astronauts at about two thirds g, then you could, in theory, maintain most of your muscle function. Brian 10:05 That's about Mars's gravity, isn't it? About two thirds, is that right? Jason 10:08 Oh, I think it's a lot less than Brian 10:09 that. Jason 10:09 It is 38% Brian 10:13 Okay, so, but that's that's in the not complete atrophy zone, right? Jason 10:17 Yes. And let me check this here. So, kept muscle mass at 1/3 g, and muscle function was preserved at two thirds g. Brian 10:26 Okay, so okay, that's weird to think about. All right, interesting. Do you guys wanna talk about a board game? So let's talk about the board game Ark Nova, which we all did get to play, although not to the point where we actually finished the game. I have been playing this game a ton. This is my new favorite game of 2026 Harmonies was 2025 Jason 10:47 and those are so different games. Brian 10:50 Well, there might be more connective tissue than you think, because it's very reactive to what's going on on that round. Ark Nova is the number two ranked game on Board Game Geek. It is played for one to four players, 90 to 150 minutes. This definitely is a lengthy game, ranked on Board Game Geek as a 3.8 out of five on complexity, which means it's, it's definitely up there on the complexity, way higher than I would typically go for. But I really loved this game. Designer by Mathias Wigge, a German board game designer, his very first game, and as far as I can tell, his only game, which, if your first game is number two on Board Game Geek, I think maybe you can rest on your laurels just a little bit. Jason 11:31 It's like he hit the top, had to retire. Brian 11:34 I mean, I don't think he's retired, but I just like, where do you go from there? Like, there's nowhere else to go but down, right? Ellen 11:40 Oh yeah, it sucks to peek so early. Brian 11:42 Yeah, for sure. So, the goal of Ark Nova is to plan and build a modern, scientifically managed zoo to support conservation projects. That's what they describe Ark Nova as, from the publisher. I didn't really find too much about the designer diary, or like, how this game was made. I'm sure there are wonderful interviews in German that I couldn't find, like, I don't know what inspired this game. I don't know what made Mathias want to make a zoo game. You know, it said that the designer and the publisher have made every effort to be accurate to the actual science. There are notable exceptions that they make, and they say we know that they're there. Some things that get the bear tag are not bears. We know raccoons are not bears, but they're close enough. Ellen 12:25 Let them be bears. Brian 12:27 Yeah, Jason 12:27 don't koala bears also have the bear tag for that? Brian 12:29 They use, and they point that out as well. For the same thing, it's like we know it's not really a bear. It bear is just a thing that we're.. it's vibes. There's some vibes here. Yeah, but even though they say that they don't really show it, like I couldn't find anywhere where they're really specific on sort of what principles they were using to make these simplifications, but that's okay. We'll come back to this conversation, this topic later. Okay, now let's talk about what does this game look like. Ark Nova, in front of you, you will have a hex grid that is where you're going to be building your zoo. Certain spots are blocked off with either rocks or water. There's also multiple different map setups, you know, from first game up to advance, with different layouts, different structures, different bonuses. You're also going to have these multiple point tracks that you're keeping track of. There's like so many little tracks on this game, and a place to display five cards. There are three types of cards in the game. There are animal cards, sponsor cards, and conservation projects. So, what are you going to do in this game? Well, the goal of this game is to build enclosures to house your animals and attract visitors. As you bring animals to your zoo, you'll raise your appeal, more people will want to come to your zoo. You'll also secure sponsors, recruit employees or build special structures. You'll also use workers, because embedded within our hackspace strategy game, there's also it's a worker placement game, sort of a little tiny one that happens in the middle of this larger game. You use your workers to form associations with partner zoos and universities and support those conservation projects. You will also increase your reputation to get rewards and draw some of those cards that are sitting up on the display. So, how do you actually play? Each round You're going to choose one of your five action cards, so those are build, animals, cards, sponsors, and association. Each of those lets you do a different thing. The five action cards have more powerful abilities based on their position from one to five, whichever card you use, then gets moved down to position one and will bump up any other cards that were below it to a more powerful spot. There's also four different places on those tracks, or on the board, or doing different things that let you upgrade your cards, so your action cards can be upgraded to a more powerful form. You can only ever upgrade four of them, so there's always going to be at least one action card that's not upgraded. So, there's, you know, lots of interesting choices to make in this game. The other major mechanic in the game is that you have breaks, so instead of having, like, well, everybody does this and it's the end of the round, you've got this little. Break tracker, another tracker that's marked with a little coffee cup. There are certain cards, like the cards action, will always add two to that break tracker. And then there are other ways that that break tracker goes up. When that fills up, everything resets. You have to discard down to your hand limit. You can have as many cards as you want until you hit the break. This is also when you earn more money and other aspects of the game get reset, like all your workers go back to their available spots again, so you can do new things with them. So, how do you win Ark Nova? Your score is based on a combination of your appeal, which is like your ticket prices, and your conservation points, so you kind of want to keep those in balance. How popular is your zoo. How good are you at sort of supporting conservation efforts? These are being tracked on two separate point tracks, and they each start on opposite ends, so they're kind of going in opposite directions. And when your markers cross each other for conservation and appeal, that triggers the end of the game. And yeah, at that point, there's like end game scoring, and you just kind of look at what everybody's got, and you know, most points wins. That is the basics of Ark Nova. Again, it's always fun to try to describe a visual board game in an audio medium, but it's.. it looks intimidating. I am glad that we played this on Board Game Arena, because it's doing all the bookkeeping for me. It's fantastic. Jason 16:22 Yeah, there have been several games we've talked about on this podcast where it's like this would be great on the computer to handle all the fiddly math. This is one of those, like, there's a lot of components, a lot of moving parts, and I can see why it's so popular. There are so many decision points, you can't have everything, you have to choose, do I want A or B, do I want C or D, and so there are real decisions you have to make that will definitely impact your game. The game is relatively easy to grasp at a high level, but it also rewards deep strategy and understanding how the parts connect together. But there is a lot of bookkeeping involved, and so having a computer to delegate that to does make it a lot nicer. Brian 17:02 It seems like it would be really easy to forget some act like, because you can have these sponsor cards that are like, oh, anytime anybody plays a predator icon in any zoo, gain some money, cool. I'm gonna forget that. The game's not gonna forget that. The game's gonna do it for me. It's just accurately keeping track of all the tags. It's this is not about board game arena, but oh man, it was really nice to play on board game. This is why I like this game so much, because it's so easy to play on board game arena. Ellen 17:29 I do personally benefit from physically interacting with, like, information, so I feel like now that you know, I've looked up some pictures of what the actual like game pieces look like, and I feel like I might benefit from playing this, like, in person with, like, actual pieces and stuff, but God, it looks like tracker hell to me. It is Ellen 17:50 just.. it Ellen 17:51 is a little bit of.. Brian 17:54 I'll tell you what, Ellen, if we're ever going to all be in the same place at the same time, we will buy a physical copy, and we'll let Jason take care of the bookkeeping, and it'll be fun. Jason 18:03 Oh, thank you. Brian 18:04 You're welcome. Jason 18:04 Yeah, no, I found on Board Game Geek, there's an image where someone composed all the bits, all the zoo pieces, all the cards, all the meeples and cubes, and everything, and it is beautiful, and so incredibly intimidating, because this thing takes up an entire table when you lay it all out like that, Ellen 18:21 it's a lot of information. Brian 18:23 Yes, for sure. One of the metrics that Jason, I informally use when we're ranking games, is the bowl of chip factor. Is there room on the table for a bowl of chips? Ellen 18:34 Oh, that's Brian 18:34 funny. Having played only on my.. I actually play on my phone, believe it or not, I don't even play on my laptop. I really severely doubt that there's much room for chips. Ellen 18:45 This game does not seem like phone activities; this seems like big screen activities. Jason 18:50 I am shocked that you can play this on your phone. Brian 18:52 I love playing it on my phone. I'm just used to it at this point. Does anybody else have anything they want to point out about Ark Nova? Anything they feel like I missed, or anything that they want to bring up. I mean, obviously, we've got like 130 animal cards in this game, which is really cool. And, obviously, we're going to talk more about that. I guess one thing I'm going to mention now is that all of the animal cards have a sort of all of the cards have a tag system on them of some kind. So, let me go over those. So, we've got the continents, Antarctica doesn't get to play, and they have compressed the Americas into south and north as just the Americas. It is a European game, so they have kept Europe and Asia separate, which, to be fair, very different animals live there. So, I think that that's legitimate. That's also true for North and South America, but whatever, the animal types - we've got birds, reptiles, primates, and then predators and herbivores, which really more specifically is mammalian predators and mammalian herbivores. I did check everything fits into those categories. There is a weird subclass called bear, which includes bears and a few other things like raccoons, coatis, and weirdly the wolverine, Brian 19:59 which. Again, Brian 20:00 just, just based on vibes, I suppose. Ellen 20:02 Yeah, that's a mustelid. Okay, that's a, that's a weasel. That okay, Brian 20:06 it is a weasel. And it's like, well, if you're gonna put the wolverine on, like, I don't know if you have a honey badger, but you should also get, let that be a bear. And, like, European badger doesn't get to be one, though. So it's like they balanced bears in a strange way. Ellen 20:20 Yeah, Jason 20:20 I am beginning to think that there was some sort of like bear lobbyist that was a friend of the game designer or something, or maybe they just like bears, because this bear category sounds excessively broad. Ellen 20:34 Big bear got to him. Brian 20:37 The other thing that I'm thinking about is that bears don't - you're never just a bear, it's always bear plus something else. Bear is a subcategory. There's also petting zoo animals, which covers a huge range of like the cute and the things that will let you touch them. And then there's not bears, there's no bear in that category, as far as I'm aware. There's research, and then there's also icons for like ones that need water and ones that need rocks, so like when you build your little enclosure next to something, like, oh, this animal requires its enclosure to be next to water, for instance, or next to a rock, you can't just play the animals willy nilly, some of them have pre requirements, right? So if you want to play a lion, that's cool, it's kind of the metaphor of the game, I think, is a lion. You have to have other predators in your zoo already before you're gonna get a lion. I think it's the idea of, like, you gotta have, you gotta know what you're doing with predators before they let you have a lion. Ellen 21:33 You can't go straight to lion. Brian 21:35 No, you don't go straight to lion. You can go straight to cheetah, though. For some reason, Ellen 21:39 cheetahs do are quite like built different cheetahs, are like the chillest big cat. Brian 21:47 Oh, is that right? They do need a lot of space, though. They need a huge Brian 21:49 enclosure. Ellen 21:50 Yeah, Jason 21:51 yeah. And I think there is a bit of a story in what these prerequisites are. I mean, the rock and the water requirements are the most obvious, but like one of the cards I played was a shoe bill, and I had to have two research icons already in my zoo, so I don't know what the story behind that is, but apparently you need to have a pretty good research program in order to actually be able to keep and maintain shoe bills. Ellen 22:12 I've heard that they're very difficult to breed in captivity, so it could be that it could be that, like, because I know that there has been some difficulty in getting them to like successfully breed in zoos, so maybe it's something to do with that. Brian 22:26 Could be there were some other ones that are similar, like Galapagos turtles, were the same way. You got to have some research representation in your zoo, right? Jason 22:33 Yeah, and another way they do it is that some animals can only be played after you have upgraded your animal card, so if you don't upgrade it, you simply can't play an African elephant or other similar animals, Brian 22:43 you have to have a partner zoo in Asia before you can even have a giant panda, that is true, Ellen 22:48 right? Yeah, I found the partner zoo requirement interesting because it reminds me a little bit of how, like, for the AZA, like one of the AZA requirements is often that, like, you have to be actively participating in some sort of, like, species survival plan, yeah, which usually involves having, like, some sort of affiliation with, like, on the ground research or conservation, like, you have to, in some way, be partnered with actual conservation, where that animal is from, and be working towards the overall long-term benefit of the species, whether that's like breeding them for, you know, genetic diversity Ellen 23:29 or bringing Ellen 23:29 them for better fitness for sport, like you have to be like participating with actual conservation for to like get AZA accreditation, Jason 23:41 and the AZA is the what the American Zoological Association? Ellen 23:44 I think it's the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Jason 23:47 Okay, Brian 23:47 which used to be the American that transitioned from another name. Hey, wonderful transition. Let's talk about zoos. Okay, I have a little thing of just like, so where did zoos come from? Why does zoos exist? The tradition of zoos really gets born out of menageries, nobles for kings, for queens. I think you could probably also get the impression from that that it is difficult, expensive, and challenging to maintain a zoo. Right, this is something that really only the rich and the powerful were doing. Now, those original menageries really weren't anything about, well, obviously they weren't about science, but they weren't even really about animal welfare, right? These were trophies, these were treasures, these were things that were put on display, they were maintained just for that, of like to show how cool and rich you are, right? Ellen 24:35 They were decorative, yeah, Brian 24:37 decorative, right, like a museum piece, like anything else that you would capture and display from a far off land. The first really public zoo. Actually, does anyone want to guess what was the origin of the public zoo? This is not you. I don't usually do quizzing, but I'm just curious. Ellen 24:52 Yeah. No, I'm trying to think of where the first one might have been. It does seem like something they do in the UK. Okay, it does seem like maybe London, maybe Brian 25:04 that's a really good guess. It was actually during the French Revolution. Jason 25:08 I should have said that. Brian 25:09 Basically, it was the reappropriation of menageries and reformation of those into a public zoo. My friend Tara is going to rip me over this pronunciation. The first public zoo was the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes during the French Revolution in 1794 So, we'll see how well I did my French there. Now, even then, the first public zoos, this idea of zoos as things for the public, they still were not for the animals, really. Attitudes about that didn't change until after World War Two. A lot of zoos were sort of destroyed during World War Two, and people started just having different thoughts about that. Also, studies about animal cognition were kind of right around that time. And then this idea of zoos having this mission of conservation, that really comes out of the 1970s environmental movement. So it really hasn't been that long, even though those sort of zoo moments are older than that, this idea of zoos having a mission of conservation is sort of a 1970s and forward thing. Ellen 26:09 Yeah, when ethics were invented, Brian 26:13 when environmental ethics were invented, anyway. But yes, you're right. Jason 26:17 Well, when environmental ethics in the West were invented. If you look in other traditions, they go back much, much further. Brian 26:23 Let's talk about this now. How do you actually.. let's say you want to open a zoo. Ellen, do you want to open a zoo? Ellen 26:30 My blood pressure just rose thinking about it, because, like, I feel like I've read through enough, like, handbooks on care and, like, enclosure development and stuff like that, that, like, I know a little bit too much about what has to go on behind the scenes to make it, like, possible, and make it work, and just the thought of having to do all that myself, or even think about it, just immediately made me stressed out. Brian 26:53 Oh yeah, for sure, which I think is why there are games about this, because something that people love to think about doing, and nobody actually wants to do it. Ellen 27:02 Love it as a concept. Brian 27:03 Yeah, so it is, as you can imagine, an exceptionally expensive thing to take on. So we can kind of go into it. What does it actually take to open a zoo? The first thing is just legal permitting, right? You cannot display wild animals. You need to talk to the USDA. You need to have permits from the endanger, based on if you're going to have endangered animals by the Migratory Bird Act. There's all these different legal requirements that cover it, not to mention purchasing the land, developing all of the enclosures that are going to be there. There's no good way to really give a universal estimate for what it costs, but I did do a little bit of research that says it is not atypical for a zoo to have to have a daily operating cost of 10 to $20,000 Jason 27:47 and we should say all those regulations and stuff are of course US-based, because that's where we're based, and we have easy access to all the regulations, Brian 27:54 very true, Jason 27:55 presumably there are very different ones, depending on which country you're in, and local regulations, and such, Ellen 28:00 even within the US, they vary a lot state to state, so like in some states their rules on that are much, much, much chiller, and on some states they're much more, so like I'm from Florida, and Florida had notoriously lacks laws on exotic, even just pet ownership, right, like not even for a zoo, but like, it was the barrier to entry was, in my opinion, too low. A lot of people were basically having private exotic pet collections and calling them a zoo, so that they could sort of justify being allowed by the USDA to keep, like, you know, lions and tigers and whatever weird stuff they wanted to have, even if it was basically just like glorified, like their own private collection, they would like be able to call it a zoo, and like it was just I feel like from state to state, you know, the laws are very, very different, Jason 28:55 so they were basically recreating their own menagerie, Brian 28:57 yeah, yeah, just calling it a zoo, continuing with that, okay, great. So you can meet that minimum legal requirement to have a zoo. You've spent an enormous amount of outlay of funds to secure the land, build your enclosures, and everything like that. Now, let's say you want to be accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Now that is a very different process, so you can open a zoo legally, is it a zoo, like Ellen was saying, where it is animal welfare is important, where you are contributing to conservation, where you are doing all of those things that we think of when we think about zoos, all of the positive things that they bring, so you have to be in operation for five years before you are even eligible to be considered for operation, you have to be operating well above the legal standards with animal welfare. First, you have to be participating in conservation. A three-person team of evaluators is going to come to your zoo for multiple days. That's going to include a veterinarian, an animal welfare specialist, and like an experienced zookeeper. They're going to go through your zoo, look through all of your records, then they are going to take their report, as well as probably a ream of paperwork, to the AZA, where a panel is then going to determine if you have qualified for AZA accreditation or not, and then that has to be renewed every five years, right? With all of that, so that's just to become accredited. Now, I also learned, so this game in particular, Ark Nova, they talk about WAZA instead of so in America, it's the Association for Zoos and Aquariums. WAZA is the world association for zoos and aquariums, which actually is an umbrella organization that every one of these.. so there's CAZA in Canada, right? There's EAZA in Europe, they all have wonderful logos, by the way. Actually, you should get little patches of every one of them. Ellen 30:43 AZA, my inbox is open. Please, please send me merch, AZA. I would love it. Ellen 30:48 I advertise for you guys all the time for free. Give me some merch, please. Brian 30:53 And I was very happy to hear that the AZA in the United States is, in fact, part of WAZA. I would not have been surprised if it was not the other way around, where like everybody else is all into this umbrella organization, but the, the US version, no we do our own things in our own accreditation, we're not going to talk to anybody else. So Ellen 31:09 I think that when you get into like AZA is very like conservation global, like they have that vibe, like they would definitely be like linked up with all the other worldwide organizations, they are definitely, they seem very like, because they are focused on, I guess, global conservation. That doesn't super surprise me. Brian 31:26 No, no, no, no, no, that's true. So, let's see. So, what are they going to look for? Species-appropriate habitats and enrichment programs, qualified veterinary care. Man, what does it take to be a zoo vet? That seems like that's a very special thing. Ellen 31:40 Yeah, I have heard some people that have like exotic pets that have said that they had to like take their pet to the zoo because like the vet at the zoo was the only one who could see their like weird pet. Brian 31:50 Trained professional staff, conservation education, and research programming as a key part there. This is one of those things we're going to come back to later. How much do they spend on conservation and how much does it impact? That's one of those things that occasionally people talk about, and that's someplace where we might see some differences between Ark Nova versus the day-to-day operation of a zoo. So, another thing that I thought was interesting to me, looking this up, of the AZA zoos, just over 50% are nonprofit, so they are presumably receiving funding from cities, from the government, from the state, things like that, but like almost 50% of zoos are for-profit enterprises, and yet they are AZA accredited. So that's kind of a brief overview of the history of zoos. What does it take to be one of these like we consider ideal zoos where conservation is at the core of what you do? So yeah, what do we talk about? Like, what do we think about how zoos are represented in Ark Nova? Do we think that they're doing a good job? And then I also want to talk about the animals, because I think that the animals are a little vibe-coded, rather than like pure accuracy. When you're playing Ark Nova, the things that you're really trying to balance are your appeal, which is basically like how many people are coming to your zoo right versus your conservation, like these are the two things that you're supposed to be doing, and I know that zoos participate in conservation, but I don't really know if that direct interaction with conservation is really what that is part of what zoos do, but I don't think that's really the majority of what zoos do, I definitely don't think it's a 50/50 balance, the way that it's kind of being portrayed in Ark Nova, Jason 33:23 I mean, we'd really need someone from a zoo to come on and tell us, like, what percentage of time, what percentage of energy, what percentage of money is going to one or another, and probably most of the money is just going to maintenance, it just costs a lot of money to feed the animals, hire the staff, all that sort of stuff, so, but the fact is, like, the good ones are probably still putting significant numbers in. I mean, I'm sure many of them have partnerships with universities and veterinary schools and such to have people come get training, to have internships, all sorts of stuff like that. Brian 33:55 Yeah, I think that's right. I think that some of the reports say, you know, it's like less than 5% of their gross budget, but that's the gross budget, like a zoo is not like I said, it's very, and like, okay, another thing in Ark Nova, you build your infrastructure, and that's it, it's built forever, you buy your animal one time, and that's it, and that's forever, Ellen 34:14 right? Brian 34:14 So they're not really accounting for maintenance costs, or like just upkeep, like at all, it's all put a bundled into that single cost. I have no idea what these credits are, either. I wouldn't be it. We often try to figure out what is our analogy here for costs. I kind of feel like one of those has got to be somewhere between 100,000 and like a million dollars or something, Ellen 34:34 right? Because these are assets that you're not just like, it's not just a, you're not just like acquiring an asset that's just yours forever. These are like assets that, first of all, will require a lot of maintenance. You'll basically just be having to like continually upkeep this asset, but also the asset will naturally expire, you know? Like, it's just gonna get old and die eventually, so like it's not like you're gonna have it forever, and also. In a lot of zoos, sometimes they don't have that animal, you know. Sometimes they'll have an animal, and then, you know, something happens, maybe it passes away, or you know, gets transferred to a different zoo, or something like that. And then they've got this enclosure, this exhibit sitting there with nothing in it, like, because they just don't have anything to put in it. And then it could be like a way long time later, that finally they get some other animal that then they're like, well, we have an empty enclosure, and they put a new animal in there, so like I have seen that happen like in zoos a lot, so it's yeah, it's not as permanent, but I can't think of any way for them to do that in Ark Nova without adding another tracker. Brian 35:39 Well, I would routinely have empty enclosures, or they were, you, we didn't get to do this, but they're one of the conservation programs, our release program, and you would actually take an animal, you would take an occupied enclosure, you would get rid of that animal, and you would turn it over to its unoccupied side, so it changes your tags and everything, so there is a yes, this enclosure is now empty, of course, you're only emptying things by releasing it into the wild, which, Brian 36:02 right, Brian 36:02 in reality, captive breeding programs definitely an important part of what zoos do. You know, there's a, a small but critical number of success stories. The, the California Condor, being like the big one, right? Like, brought back from what was it, 23 individuals or something horrible, Brian 36:19 that Ellen 36:20 it was like in the double digits, yeah. Brian 36:21 Okay, to actual breeding populations in the wild, but a lot of times the problem these release programs can be really difficult for certain animals, like particularly animals with a lot of complex behavior, complex mental process, animals with culture. It's very hard to take something like that and expect to be able to rear it in a way that it can then survive in the wild, right. So, but sometimes you can do it. Sometimes it's really important, and, and I feel like the real value of zoo is is the inspiration quotient, and I don't know if it's necessarily a captive animal's job to do that, but like the education that that inspiration of the next generation of people who want to work with and preserve animals. I feel like that's a value that's very hard to put an actual number on, Ellen 37:04 right? I do, and I do think it does make an actual, like, impact on ideology, like I think getting to see, for kids, especially for young people, getting to see, you know, real these very impressive animals, very charismatic animals, especially, and being able to see them in person and perceive them as being like actual living, living, breathing things right in front of you, sharing a space with you. I think is going to make you care more about the world, and also like understand the world outside of your neighborhood, right? If you like are growing up in the USA, you and you get to see giraffes and rhinos at the zoo, right? Like, I think that will inspire you to like actually visualize the world outside of your immediate surroundings, and so I do think it is really important just for like broadening a worldview, I think, was which is valuable in itself, and and also like inspiring young people to care about their environments and teach them about conservation and things like that. I don't know about you guys, I, as a kid, I was always at the zoo. I was not a sign reader. I'm sorry, guys, I'm not Brian 38:11 really.. you're not a Brian 38:12 sign reader, you're not a sign Brian 38:13 reader, Ellen 38:14 not a big sign reader. I was there, I was not.. I was not reading all the signs, I was there for the vibes, I was there to look at the animals and watch, and, and yap at the zookeepers. I was always talking to the zookeepers, so the zookeepers would talk to me. That's how I'm learning, but, like, I'm not a big stand there and look at the sign person. But, but, yeah, I do feel like I was a kid who grew up going to zoos, and it hugely affected, like, the trajectory of my life. So, I do think it makes a real impact. It's not really a money-making impact, but it's there. Jason 38:45 Playing off that a bit, I think the quality of the zoo also plays into that, where if you see animals in a more rich environment, something where they can really engage with it, it's better. Whereas, like, I remember when I was a kid, we were going.. I don't even remember which zoo this was that, but most of it was fine, but then we got to like the one thing where it's like this enclosure for a crocodile or something, where the enclosure was completely bare and only just slightly larger than the animal itself. I'm really hoping it was just a temporary housing while it was this real one's being prepared, but I don't know, I was like 10, and like that it can have the opposite effect, and so along those lines, like what are the sort of things that are needed to do a high quality animal enclosure, like what does an animal need for that enclosure to provide stimulation, or whatever it is that the animal is looking for in its environment. Ellen 39:37 I do think that, like, exhibit design is very interesting. I actually just a few weeks ago had got a chance to talk to Dr. Lisa Daybeck, but she got to - she's a researcher who has worked with research in Papua New Guinea, and she helped design the new sort of like tree tops, like cloud forest to. Exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo here in Seattle, which is close to where I live, and I got to ask her about, like, what kind of thought process went into, like, designing exhibits for tree kangaroos, because she was a tree kangaroo researcher, and you know, she talked about the fact that, you know, tree kangaroos live in, obviously, trees, so they need a lot of climbing structures, but she said that you can't just do vertical structures, because they don't just climb straight up and down, and that's it. They need a lot of like diagonals, they need a lot of horizontal space, they need a lot of like, you know, sort of catwalk style, like trees that they can walk across. So she talked about how they need that sort of structure. Whenever I look at exhibits for things I'm always trying to look at, like what are the containment, like how are they trying to like hide their containment, like I'm trying to think of like how are they not, how are they making it so this animal can't escape, and also doing that in such a way where they're not just like behind iron bars, right, like finding the balance between like security and aesthetics, because aesthetics are important, like what humans are perceiving is very important in the zoo, right? Like, it has to look nice, and also it has to photograph well, you know? Like, if you've got like an enclosure that's like surrounded by a chain link fence, then all of the pictures are going to be seen through a fence, right? And then all the pictures are going to come out kind of like, you know, people. it doesn't look as impressive, so I do think that that, like, exhibit design is very interesting. I just got to go to a few months ago, I got to go to the San Diego Zoo. They invited me, I was so excited to go see their new - they have a brand new elephant exhibit, and this exhibit is huge, like when you are in, yeah, they better be right, like they need a lot of space, and so it's like the sort of thing where, like, from the walkway you can't see the other side of, like, the enclosure, like you really can't even see, like, where the enclosure ends, and some of that, I think, is like clever, like putting the sort of fencing on the other side of a hill, right, so that, like, you really can't see where the fence is, but it is just a massive exhibit, and they had, I want to say, like, eight elephants in there, and we could not see all of them. There were, we could only see probably, like, four of the elephants, and they were like, "Oh, yeah, there's a bunch more somewhere. So, Jason 42:17 I'm sure they have cameras tracking every single one of those elephants. Ellen 42:20 I'm sure they knew exactly where those elephants were, but we couldn't see them, which I think is like, if your exhibit is big enough that four elephants cannot be seen, I feel like that is like a good amount of space. How are you hiding four elephants? Brian 42:34 Yes, good question. I guess the other thing is, like, but you also want your guests to be able to see the animals, so that's kind of a problem too, right? Ellen 42:43 Yeah, I've seen some of them get kind of like clever with it at Northwest Trek, which is, which is an AZA accredited zoo here in Washington. They have, they have a lot of like little nocturnal creatures, so like they have like skunks and like American badgers and like beavers and stuff like that, creatures that would be more likely to be active at night, so what they have is they have this sort of like shaded nighttime den area that they can go that's dark, but then there's like glass that like you can see them in their little den, oh actually in San Diego Zoo, at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Park, which is like the second, like, location in Escondido, California. They have a platypus, they have a platypus exhibit, apparently only zoo in the world outside of Australia that has platypuses. Brian 43:31 I was thinking, I've never seen one, Ellen 43:34 right? Brian 43:34 This is why Ellen 43:35 I got to see them in San Diego, and they have an interesting thing, because, like, you mentioned, you have to, you want the guests to be able to see the animal. This is a nocturnal animal. Platypuses come out at night, so the platypus exhibit is actually completely enclosed. It's all in like a building, and the lights in the building are reversed in like a day-night cycle, where the lights are off and it's dark during the day, Brian 44:02 and just like Australia, they're just keeping on local time. Ellen 44:07 They like, they have like reversed like day-night cycle, so that the platypus will be active when the people are there. Brian 44:14 That's cool. I've seen this in, like, bat, yeah, and like bat enclosures. You'll go in, it's all like red light, so that the bats can be, Ellen 44:20 yeah, you were telling me a little bit about, like, the idea of, like, you know, zoos being good versus bad, and I feel like I have seen such a wide spectrum of zoos, like Jason, you mentioned seeing one that had, like, a really terrible crocodile exhibit that was just, like, you know, I'm sure it was probably with just, like, a concrete pit, probably Brian 44:39 A concrete pit with a crocodile in it. Ellen 44:41 I've seen a lot of concrete pit zoos, and I've seen, you know, the San Diego Zoo, and I've seen, like, honestly, I'm from Jacksonville, Florida. I think we had a world-class zoo. The Jacksonville Zoo is fantastic. So, like, I've seen great zoos, I've seen terrible zoos. So, like, I really don't think it's the sort of thing that you can say, like, blanket, like they're all great or they're all bad. Head, because, like, I've seen ones that do it really, really well. I've seen ones that I thought should be shut down. Jason 45:06 So, aside from looking for, like, accreditation, how can people know if a zoo is good or not before they go, before they give them their money? Ellen 45:14 Oh, there are a lot of things you can look for, because I have had people mention to me that, like, if they work at smaller zoos. If it's a small zoo, like you mentioned, Brian, AZA accreditation is a huge process. It is. It takes forever. It's also very expensive, and a lot of, especially smaller zoos, don't have that kind of budget, and maybe cannot get AZA accreditation, which doesn't mean that they're bad. Like, it doesn't mean that they're not doing the right thing, it just means that they probably don't have that kind of budget, which is, you know, fine. So you have to put a little more legwork into making sure there are some red flags that I've learned you can kind of look out for. One of them is doing paid, like hands on contact, particularly with animals that you shouldn't have hands on contact with, so like predators, right, like hands on contact with like a big cat, that's a big no no, hands on contact with a very young animal that's a big no no, like those those sort of like paid opportunities where you can like pay to stress an animal out, like, is usually Ellen 46:22 that's Ellen 46:22 kind of like that's kind of a red flag, you know, like, and I've seen some zoos that have, like, ambassador animals, where they can pay a little extra money and go, you know, hang out with, like, a Galapagos tortoise, is probably going to be fine, they don't care that you're there, you know, they'll have, like, or they'll have, I did one, actually, actually in Atlanta, at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, my husband surprised me with a the behind the scenes sea otter tour, where you could like go to the behind the scenes of the sea otter exhibit at the Georgia Aquarium, and you do have to pay extra for it, and you do sort of get hands on contact, but the way they do it is interesting, they have this sort of like plexiglass like barrier between you and the otters like tank, and you're basically spot training where you like put your finger up to the hole and the otter comes up and boops their nose like onto your finger, so it's a very like animal lead, it's like if the animal doesn't want to do it, they're not going to do it, so it's like it's kind of up to them and it's not stressing them out, but you do still get to like boop an otter with your, with your finger, which is very, very nice. Jason 47:25 So, like, I know so many people that would pay extra money to boop an otter's nose. Ellen 47:30 I did. It was worth it, was worth every penny. So, there are things you can look out for, especially like those sort of money grab opportunities, like if they're asking you to pay extra money to like stress an animal out on purpose, that's usually a red flag. I also kind of look to see, like, okay, what, where are you getting your animals from? That's a huge thing, like, are you only taking in rescued animals from other places, are you like breeding them, you know, like, I, you can look into a little bit, like, if they'll, if they say on their website where they get their animals from, that can be helpful if they're not saying it might be because they don't want you to know, usually places that, like, are getting their animals either, like, from a rescue situation, or if they're participating in a species survival program, they'll be very, like, upfront about that, that information will be, will be very available. Jason 48:21 Yeah, we actually have a very tiny zoo here in Athens that is a purely rescue zoo. It's a small free zoo. It's, it's not gonna make anyone's list of like top 100 zoos in the nation. It's very tiny, but it's it's full of rescued animals, and they're very open about that. These are all animals that are not able to be released to the wild because they have critical injuries or whatever, and so they're kept here to have a good life. Ellen 48:44 We had a there was a big cat sanctuary like that from in North Florida, and one thing that, like, also something that I would see in places that I consider to be red flags were like not using proper safety protocols between their staff and the animals, where like if the staff is like in an enclosure with something like a tiger or a lion or a big cat or something like that, like with the AZA, they have like what do they call it, protected contact or something like that, or like there are steps basically where they're there, they should never be like in the enclosure with certain animals, there's some where it's fine, they're not going to do anything, but if it's something like I had Marco Wendt on, who worked, who works at the San Diego Zoo, and he was talking about cassowaries, and like cassowaries are like Jason 49:30 those are basically dinosaurs, Ellen 49:32 yeah, so especially places will post on social media, like they'll usually tell on themselves on social media where they'll like post a lot of videos of their keepers, like in the enclosure with like a live tiger or something like that, and you're like, okay, you shouldn't be doing that, because if they're not, if they're not using good safety protocols with their staff, I feel like there's probably some other things they're not doing probably super responsibly and safely either. Brian 49:59 Well, it also just. Makes you wonder, it's like that. If that is a wild animal acting like a wild animal, you shouldn't be around it like that, right? Ellen 50:07 Yeah, Brian 50:08 like, so why isn't that animal attacking them? Or anyway, Ellen 50:13 I've seen, I've heard a lot of horror stories about like tourist traps that will, like, sit like heavily, heavily sedate animals, so that they can like take pictures with them, and have their cute little moment. Do your research, like, look into a place before you visit them. I think is my big takeaway, right? Just like, look into them, see what you can find, see if they're being cagey on their website. Brian 50:35 Is there anything else we want to talk about about the science that is represented in Ark Nova? If there's not, I would love to step into our nitpick corner, because during the course of our conversation I found mine. Ellen 50:45 Oh, Jason 50:46 all right. Do tell. Ellen 50:46 Yeah, let me hear it. Brian 50:47 My nitpick about Ark Nova as a zoo management game is that there's not nearly enough poop. Ellen 50:55 I would like to see more like management Sims deal with Brian 51:01 everything that I've seen and researched, everything that I did getting ready for this says that being a zookeeper is about 50% poop management. Ellen 51:09 Yeah, it's mostly poop management. Yeah, Brian 51:12 so I feel like maybe that break tracker needs to be based on it's actually the poop tracker, it should just be a little poop emoji, and when you reach a certain amount of poop, that's it. You've got to stop, clean out, and that's in between rounds. Ellen 51:24 It should be like it's like a, it's like a flood tracker that like the poop level rises gradually. Brian 51:32 I thought of one more nitpick, and if nobody else has one, I'm gonna list my, that my second Brian 51:37 one as Brian 51:37 well. Jason 51:37 I think I would need to play the game a few more times to pull out, I mean, there's there's enough depth in this game that I don't think I can make a good saying of what I would fix until I understand it better. Brian 51:52 Okay, that's fair. Then next time I invite you to play, you got to accept my invitation. Okay, I've got two games running right now. Anyway, my other nitpick, then, and then we can be done with nitpick corner. You can build all of these structures in the game, specialized enclosures and things, for like, there's a meerkat den, and there's all these things that give you special powers in Board Game Arena there's an arcade that actually, like, do you know what they don't have all those special structures, they don't have a gift shop, and that's crazy. Ellen 52:24 Would like to see that. Brian 52:26 Have you ever been to a zoo that didn't have a gift shop? Jason 52:29 Isn't that what the little kiosks are? I mean, they generate income for you. It might be like pretzels and slushies, but it may also just be a bunch of merch. Brian 52:36 I think they're selling pretzels and slushies. I did find an image of a kiosk from some kind of bonus tile, and it was definitely a place where they had like little tables, and they were selling like cotton candy and stuff, but no, I need, I gotta go buy a stuffed animal, and you know, a little battery-powered fan that's gonna break the next day, like that's what Ellen 52:55 , yeah, I need, I need a carrot at the end to encourage my kid to lock in while we're at the zoo, like I need something to encourage my kid to just like chill out for a few minutes, like don't worry guys, if you, if you guys can lock in and get through this zoo trip with no ridiculousness, I mean, there could be a stupid little knickknack in it for you, Jason 53:17 so it sounds like the love of zoos and talking to zookeepers may not have passed on faithfully. Ellen 53:25 No, my kids are goblins, which I don't know where they got that from. I have no idea. Jason 53:32 You say that, and I don't know exactly what it means, but it sounds like they're trying to eat the animals. Ellen 53:41 Some of them, I catch them licking their lips a little bit. Brian 53:45 That snake looks delicious. All right, let's.. well, then let's move on to grades. Ellen, if you don't want to grade, you don't have to. We, Jason and I, are professors, so we give two grades. We will grade on fun, and we grade on scientific accuracy, so we'll just do this back to back, and I actually would like Jason to start this time. Jason 54:08 Okay, so I'm having to think again, like I really feel like I need several more plays throughs, which is a big ask in the game that take can take two plus hours for a single playthrough to feel this in depth. What I saw of the game, I would be comfortable giving it probably about an A minus for science. It's like they, they seem to have done a good job trying to tie things together. They have a good amount of actually, they don't have a good amount of information on the animals that they have pictures, and they have some tags. Brian 54:39 They have tags and where they're from, that's about it. Ellen 54:42 It's like a Yu-Gi-Oh card. Jason 54:45 Yeah, I think there would be opportunity there. So many games like this nowadays, they have that little line of flavor text that tells you about the animal, Ellen 54:52 I'd like to see more flavor text, for sure. Yeah, Jason 54:54 or a genus species or something, those little things that are not necessary parts of the game, but that you let. You layer it on a little bit more, and I think that they easily could have done that, because at least most of the cards that I was looking at seemed like they had extra space available to do so, Jason 55:10 and again, they were electronic versions, so maybe the physical versions do not have that, but it seems like there would be a very easy opportunity to just add a little extra layer of it, there, which is what I'm going to put out, an A minus, because largely I think it does what it wants to do, as far as being accurate, and the fact that the rule book says, like, they tried to be accurate, they acknowledged some of the places they, they diverged, I think that's fine, I guess going back, I do have the one nitpick, is just the bears, someone just likes bears too much, and it just wants to draw that circle wide, Brian 55:45 but again, bear was just a subclass, nothing was a bear, everything was a bear plus x, although I don't really know what that means, Ellen 55:52 but the fact that the bears are like the only subclass is very funny to me, Brian 55:55 that is true, it's like bears, no, you're right, there's no reason it should just be bears, Jason, let's do fun before I, before I derail us completely. Jason 56:04 Okay, so I will preface this by saying that I feel very inadequate to give a fun judgment on something that is number two on Board Game Geek. It's like I think the general geek culture has spoken, however, people do have different levels of fun. I can definitely see this being in the A category for fun. It definitel

27. Mai 20261 h 7 min

S3E04 - Diatoms (Diatoms)

#Diatoms #DONA #Ludoliminal #Microbiology #BoardGames #Science In this episode we're going microscopic to talk about everything Diatoms! Starting from the game by Ludoliminal and going through the classic (and obscure) Victorian art form of arranging these beautiful glass-shelled organisms on microscope slides, our special guest Laura Aycock--collections manager at the world's *largest* diatom herbarium--helps us understand all the beauty and wonder of these tiny, shimmingering marvels. From tepid ponds to hot springs to arctic ice, diatoms are everywhere, and they do a lot for us while looking absolutely fabulous. So grab a microscope and prepare to never look at pond scum the same way again! Timestamps * 00:00 Introductions * 01:09 Fun facts: diatom oxygen and ice habitats * 03:53 Overview of Diatoms the game * 11:41 What is a diatom? * 15:06 What is a diatom herbarium? * 20:55 Diatom reproduction (and shrinkage!) * 25:43 Diatom artwork * 32:20 Diatomacious earth * 35:06 DNA complicating things * 38:15 Weird diatom facts * 42:05 Nitpick corner & grades * 47:27 Wrap-up Links * Diatoms official website [https://ludoliminal.com/products/diatoms-the-board-game] (Ludoliminal Games) * Diatoms living in arctic ice [https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/09/extreme-life-arctic-ice-diatoms-ecological-discovery] (Stanford University) * Diatom art [https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=04d4ecd65c289c33&sxsrf=ANbL-n4AdCpcH4Ox0YSU2FgkvvbA2BmX_g:1776201798923&udm=2&fbs=ADc_l-aN0CWEZBOHjofHoaMMDiKpaEWjvZ2Py1XXV8d8KvlI3o6iwGk6Iv1tRbZIBNIVs-6YKj3ieLLpE5n_AQ7knvnyHmq2hxoqmS0Tx38rbtTMol8iKRZT7U0fRj0ySfd3zK5Kx6lMk6nJX7Hu-krBVCrY2zUD2rBHT8008W4nfB_nunebHy0y-HQPyWffLHJ9RtVTZ6_9z-kIyQiIKde-5n9MhDksEg&q=diatom+art&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjMr5iqo-6TAxXFC3kGHdy7LOYQtKgLegQIDhAB&biw=1600&bih=1040&dpr=1] (Google image search) * Diatoms of North America [https://diatoms.org/] (and recorded lectures [https://www.youtube.com/@nadiatoms2773/featured]) * Jeffrey Stone's diatom electron micrographs [https://www.instagram.com/diatomsattack/] (Instagram) * The Diatomist [https://vimeo.com/90160649?fl=pl&fe=vl] documentary (Vimeo) * Henry Dalton's micro-mosaics [https://microscopist.net/DaltonH.html] (Microscopist.net) * Amazon rain forest fertilization [https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2010GL043486] (Wiley.com) * Diatom slide preparation part 1 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euqQTWaHx0I] & part 2 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBdB9OA0Dek] (YouTube) * Specific diatoms: * Ancient diatoms [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667116300726] (ScienceDirect) * Campylodiscus [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Electron-micrograph-of-the-diatom-Campylodiscus-sp-at-890-magnification-Photograph_fig2_11613865] - Pringles chip shaped diatom (ResearchGate) * Entomoneis [https://diatoms.org/genera/entomoneis] - twisted figure 8 (Diatoms.org) * Ethnomodiscus [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethmodiscus] - 2m diatom (Wikipedia) * Aulacodiscus [http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/Oamaru-diatoms/image/show-img.html?fileName=oamaru_3otilt500.jpg&bioName=Aulacodiscus%20sollittianus%20var.%20novaezealandica&comment=External%20valve%20view%20tilted.%20Distinguishing%20features%20of%20this%20species%20include%20%28a%29%20angular%20areolae%20covering%20surface%20of%20valve%20%28cribra,%20which%20usually%20occlude%20areolae%20in%20this%20genus,%20appear%20to%20have%20eroded%29;%20%28b%29%20distal%20ends%20of%20rimoportulae%20broadly%20rounded;%20%28c%29%20collar%20visible%20at%20junction%20of%20mantle%20and%20valvocopula;%20%28d%29%20valvocopula%20with%20vertical%20rows%20of%20small%20areolae.%20Refer%20to%20Tiffany%20%282023%29%20for%20identification;%20Witkowski%20et%20al.%20%282017%29%20fig%2043-44;%20Round%20et%20al.%20%281990%29%20for%20valvocopula%20and%20genus;%20Charles%20%282017%29;%20Heck%20%282015%29%20bild%20127;%20D%26S%20%281989%29%20pg%2076%20for%20description.%20%28D%26S%201989%20uses%20alveolae%20instead%20of%20areolae.%20Areolae%20is%20used%20here%20because%20Round%20et%20al.%20has%20the%20advantage%20of%20SEM%20to%20more%20clearly%20see%20the%20structures.%29] - Diatom with antennae (MIcroscopy UK) * The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University [https://ansp.org/] Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net [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 0:00 Jason, hello and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games. Jason Wallace 0:10 Today, we will be talking about diatoms by ludoliminal Games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian, and today, for our special guest, we have Laura Aycock. Laura, can you please introduce yourself? Laura 0:25 Sure. I'm Laura Aycock. I am the Collection Manager of the diatom herbarium at the Academy natural sciences in Philadelphia that's affiliated with Drexel University. And I've been working with diatoms for about 15 years, and I find them fun and enjoyable. Brian 0:38 That's really cool. Thank you for coming on, Jason. How did you manage to get the exact right person to come talk to us? Good job Jason Wallace 0:44 being very persistent with emails. Laura 0:46 Theres also not very many of us Jason Wallace 0:49 there is that when there's actually a website called diatoms.org, that has all the nation's top diatoms scientists linked to it, somehow, it's not that hard to find someone. So before we get into this lovely game about absolutely beautiful, microscopic creatures. Let's start with our fun science facts. So Laura, as our guest, we usually pass the privilege to you to start. Do you have something you'd like to share with our audience? Laura 1:09 Sure. My favorite fact about diatoms is they produce about a fourth of the oxygen we breathe. So they're very important to life on Earth, and we wouldn't survive without them. Brian 1:16 So trees get all the credit, but they're stealing that Jason Wallace 1:19 we talkabout plant blindness, where people just don't look at plants. There's definitely what macroscopic bias, where we just don't think about all the things that aren't within, you know, human size scale. So yeah, trees get all the credit, but all these little microbes are actually doing a whole bunch of the work there. Laura 1:33 Yeah, diatoms, along with other groups of algae, actually produce about half of the oxygen we breathe, so they are as important, if not more important, than land plant, but no one thinks about them, sees them, or really acknowledges them. Brian 1:44 So let me think. Then I'm thinking about this track of carbon dioxide that we've been seeing sort of dip and rise and dip and rise and dip and rise. Now that dip and rise that's from the like Alpine forests in the northern continents, right? But the stable activity that's presumably all the algae in the ocean, right? Or do they also fluctuate on an annual cycle? Jason Wallace 2:04 I'd assume they'd also fluctuate annually, just because of temperature, if nothing else. Laura 2:07 It depends on the environment. So diatoms in the ocean are relatively consistent, but I think it does fluctuate with temperature. I actually don't know too much about marine diatoms, because my expertise lies in benthic freshwater diatoms. Brian 2:19 Benthic freshwater. So that means, like, the things that live in the muck at the bottom of fresh water environments, Laura 2:24 yeah, the brown slime you see when you go to creeks. That's what I love to look at. Brian 2:28 Oh, you're a slimologist. That's awesome. Jason Wallace 2:30 All right, Brian, your turn. What fun fact do you have for us today? Brian 2:33 Well, funny enough, I also brought a diatoms one I was looking for something recently about diatoms in the news. It's a press release out of Stanford, about diatoms remaining active down to negative 15 degrees centigrade, so cold, basically, in solid ice isn't as solid as you'd think. Actually, it can have these little micro fluidic chambers within it, sort of threads of liquid water. And the diatoms were actually not only colonizing these but moving through these chambers. I didn't even know diatoms could move. I guess they have like little actin filaments that they use to move on slime. I want to know more about this, and I'm hoping that Laura can explain it. Laura 3:08 Diatoms are very capable of active movement. Not all of them, though, they have to have a slit in the center of the cell, which is called the raphe and they can secrete mucilage. And they glide along like slugs. Brian 3:18 So you can tell just by looking at them if they're going to be able to be mobile? Laura 3:21 yep, Brian 3:22 Do all the ones with Raphe have mobility? Or do some of them have the Raphe and are not mobile? Laura 3:26 No, all of them have mobility. The raphe can vary in its placement on the cell, whether it's in the center of the cell, along the sides, if it's on one half of the valve. Because diatoms are made in two parts, they're kind of like a box where you have a top half and a bottom half. So when they're dead, they split apart. So you'll see the raphe on one valve and not the other. But they do have their Raphe. Brian 3:43 That's really cool, man. So diatoms are kind of like mimics in D & D. They live in a box. Jason Wallace 3:48 They are a box, a glass box. They make themselves. Brian 3:51 That's okay. These are very cool organisms. Jason Wallace 3:53 They are. So let's go on to this game, then, because this game is a beautiful game about these beautiful creatures. So diatoms is a game by Ludoliminal Games and published by 25th century games. It actually won a 2025 Mensa select award, and I like the tagline on the publisher's website. It is a stunningly beautiful game about making art from algae, which is not something you would think about, but the whole metaphor of this game is about Victorian diatom art, which is this obscure art form, where, back when microscopes, well, microscopes for the masses, were a new fangled thing, and people were trying to sell them. They wanted to sell things that you could look at right away. And so they would sell these little slides you could put under and they had diatom art on them, which is what you're making in this game. We'll talk more about what diatom art is in a little bit for the game itself, its basic stats. It's for one to four players, obligatory single player mode, although I'll say this is one of the few games we've played where I actually have played the single player mode, and I can attest it's actually quite fun. Brian 4:51 Yeah, I was gonna say you actually said you liked it like you enjoyed it. Jason Wallace 4:54 It's very calming. And ages eight plus about 30-45, minutes to play. Suggested retail price is $55 a lot of that is probably going to the very high quality components. So there's very high quality chipboard, most of which has foil embossing on it in some degree, oftentimes, lots. The game is played in two sections. You have your tile placing one where you've got these hexagonal tiles that have colors coming off of them. So every hexagon consists of six triangles joined at the tip. And so those six triangles can be any one of a number of colors. They've got five different ones, red, yellow, green, blue and purple. Some of them are white as wild spots. And it's a typical like color matching game. You have the hexes down on the board, and then you try to place new hexes so that the colors match. That part is fairly straightforward. The thing is based on the colors you make at that intersection. So when you place a hex down next to two other tiles, it forms a point where all three of those tiles touch, and where, therefore there are six triangles around that central point. And the size and distribution of the color patches determines which diatoms you then collect. Metaphorically, this is you like looking at a patch of water under the microscope, and like sucking it up and being able to grab some diatoms out of it. The second half of the game, every player has their own little player board, so everyone's working individually. Here you've got the shared water tiles, but an individual board, and you're placing those diatoms on the board in order to make arrangements. And the board has all these cutouts where I haven't counted the number of spaces. There's probably like 40 or 50 of them, each one of them can only hold one of two shapes, and they've got it drawn out. So you can say, Oh, this spot can either hold a triangle or a star, but it cannot hold a circle, or this one can hold an oval or a circle, but it can't hold a square, that sort of thing, because the diatoms, in addition to coming in five colors, also come in five shapes, and those shapes are based on the size of the color patch you made when placing those tiles together. The idea is you're trying to place these down artfully. And of course, because it's a game, it's not just aesthetically pleasing. They have rules for how you gain points. And when I have taught this game to other people, which we did at a few conventions last year, keeping track of the scoring rules is the hardest part of this game. People get the tile laying pretty easily. People get getting the shapes and collecting the diatoms. Remembering the many, many different ways you can score points is actually the hardest part, because you can score points based off of how many of different colors you have. More diatoms of a single color gets you more points. You can get them based off of where they are. So the board is circular. It has kind of three rings. You have your inner ring, your middle ring and your outer ring. And then, based on the diversity of shapes you have in those, determines points there. And then there's all these lines of symmetry, so horizontal and vertical and diagonals. And if you have matching pairs of diatoms on those on the same ring, the score sheet for this is, thankfully very well put together. There are literally, like, 20 or 30 spots for you to write down. Oh, here's how many points I got for this particular arrangement here, and then this one here, it walks you through. If you just go through the score sheet, you will have everything. And it makes tallying it up at the end easy. It does not make keeping all those rules in your head during play any easier. That is still quite hard. And I think a lot of people, at least a lot of people I've played with, reach the point where they focus on a few things and they just kind of don't worry about the rest, even after several plays, when I'm looking at this, like, okay, I can keep a few things in head, but I can't keep all possible ones in head. So sometimes it's just like, Well, I'm just going to play this here, get a few things, and then I'll figure out where I can place them well. Brian 8:21 I think that's everything in the game. When you're talking about components, one of the things they have are these little petri dishes that you get to keep all your pieces in. Except I can tell you, if you've ever worked with actual petri dishes, these are much nicer than regular petri dishes. These are actually like your normal petri dish. If you handle it wrong, it immediately cracks. These are actually meant to hold up over time. Jason Wallace 8:32 Yes, these are not meant to be disposed of after a few days. Brian 8:35 No, for sure, Jason Wallace 8:36 and they have a few other things. So they have, like every player has their own little like score guidebook so that you can look through and you can see how the scoring works. They've got this cute little magnifying glass so you can, like, isolate the little six point section that you created so you can more easily track because some people have trouble mentally sectioning that off from the larger tiles in order to get it. And several the people that I taught they actually really liked using that tool. Brian 8:59 Oh, really, Jason Wallace 8:59 they liked using it because it because it made it much easier for them to figure out how many of each diatom and each color they needed to get. Brian 9:06 I could see using it for just the role play purpose of looking like you're holding up your little magnifying glass to the water to show the section you're working on. But interesting, I figured that was just for fun. Jason Wallace 9:16 No, it's actually quite useful for many people, and that's most of the rules. It's actually a very simple game. It's a very elegant game. You can bring in additional judging rules to make it even more complicated, if you want. And one thing is that once you set a diatom down on your board, which you have until it comes back to you. So this game could take forever, if you had to wait for someone to place their diatoms before the next person went but you don't, you have until it's your turn again. But once they're down, you can't move them, which, while being a nice standard game mechanic of like, you have to commit, I also really like it because of the metaphor. Because the metaphor is you are gluing these to a microscope slide. Once they're glued down, you can't move them. And so I think it actually works really well doing double duty there. Brian 9:51 So we got this game, I think I picked it up at some point, because it was, it seemed like it was thematic. It. Is extremely pretty. But we actually had discussions, is this a game we can talk about? Because this game, the metaphor, is really about an obscure Victorian art form, more than it is about diatoms. But we also thought, when else are we going to get the opportunity to have somebody on to tell us about diatoms? So we should just take this opportunity and talk about it anyway. Jason Wallace 10:18 I'm much more liberal about what can go on as long as it has science in it, somewhere that we can talk about, I'm fine. And definitely this is a science light game. It is inspired by science. In fact, reading the designer diary, the tile laying component is a very early part of the game. That was sort of what the core was, but the diatom veneer, so the theming of the game was actually a very late addition. The designer actually says how she was playing with the game. She had the tile laying down. It was fine. It was actually like collecting fractions, because it originally was something to do about, like math fluency due to some fellowship she'd gotten, but it really wasn't quite jelling. And then she took her child to the aquarium, and they had some poster about diatoms. And unfortunately, the link to her picture was broken, so I couldn't see what the poster actually said, but apparently it talked about, like these microscopic silicon-based algae that made these beautiful structures. And she just fixated on that. She started doing deep dives and researching, and she found this beautiful art form. And then apparently the rest of the game just fell together after that, like it made perfect sense. She redid where you placed your little fraction things. Originally, it was some sort of like bingo board into the actual diatom one. And that's fascinating to me, because the metaphor feels like it goes so deep into this game in terms of how you actually play things. It's just fascinating to me that was actually the last addition to it interesting. But anyway, that's enough about the game, per se. Now we're going to go to the actual science here. So Laura, this is where you're gonna need to help us. Because even though we both study microscopic things, we're both kind of bacteria people, well, plants and bacteria, and my understanding is that a diatom is neither of those. So what is a diatom? Laura 11:54 That is a question I get asked more than probably any other question in my career. And a diatom is neither a plant nor an animal. It is a protist, however, is algae, which, if you've ever looked at a phylogenetic tree of life, you'll notice there's the three main kingdoms. Algae actually spans all three. So it's not monophyletic, which is the term we use. But diatoms are a particular group of algae, and they're all share the trait that they have a cell wall made of glass or silica. Jason Wallace 12:17 Okay, so protist protists are single celled eukaryotes, so they're not bacteria. They actually have complicated cells like we do, that has a nucleus and all the organelles. Brian 12:26 but that's okay. We're not going to hold that against them. Jason Wallace 12:28 My understanding is that most eukaryotes are protists. This is another case where we are very biased by animals and plants and fungi, because we can see them. But the vast majority of the Tree of Life of eukaryotes, of anything like us, is actually microscopic, and we kind of ignore it. So you mentioned that they make a cell wall out of glass, out of silica. Why silica? It's like cellulose all over the place, chitin for fungi, peptidoglycan for bacteria, silica, glass. Why silica? Brian 12:57 And it's there. Actually it is their cell wall in the same way that, like a plant cell wall has cellulose and pectin, they make their cell wall out of silicates? Laura 13:05 Yeah, they do. So they don't make the silica itself, which, if you think about it, that causes them to not have to use as much energy as it would to make an organic component. They pull it from the environment and then build the silica cell walls. So it's really readily available in the environment, which is a easy resource for them to grab. It's hard. It protects them from predators. It's opaline, and it has the ability for them to have pores, which allows for greater sunlight penetration, for photosynthesis. So there's a lot of reasons why they have these silica cell walls. Jason Wallace 13:33 So opaline? transparent? Laura 13:34 Yep, they're opaline. They're not fully transparent. Of course, we don't really know, because it's really hard to see a diatom and what it actually looks like. But the common belief is that if you were to look and you know what an opal looks like, they're probably similar to that, where they kind of have this milky exterior that is radiant, and then it has these beautiful colors to it. But we don't really know they're so tiny we can only see what we can see through the microscope. And they are see through. So when you look at them alive, you see the chloroplast, you see all the organelles, you see this beautiful golden brown color when you look at them, because you're not seeing the actual cell wall, because it's mostly see through and transparent. Brian 14:07 So I have two questions. One question is, what does the name mean? What's the origin of the name diatom? Laura 14:13 The name diatom comes from it being two parts. So it has two halves, because diatoms are shaped like a box where they have the top half and a bottom half. Jason Wallace 14:19 Okay, so probably Greek diatomos or something like that. Laura 14:22 That sounds right. Brian 14:23 The other question was, so they're photosynthetic, but they're not related to green plants, is that right? Laura 14:28 Correct? The algal group that is most closely related to plants would be green algae, but diatoms are not green algae. They are in their different kingdom. Brian 14:35 okay, different kingdom. So they're, they're brown algae, right? Laura 14:38 No brown algae would be seaweeds. Oh, they're called golden brown algae. Is their common name. Brian 14:43 Okay? There's too many flavors and colors of algae. I guess there's a reason they span, you know, so many different branches. Golden brown algae. Laura 14:50 Algae literally fits in every kingdom of the tree of life. Brian 14:54 So algae is a little bit like when you say tree, lots of different things make trees, right? An algae is just a way. Of being a living thing. Laura 15:01 Yep, traditionally, they're photosynthetic. I think that's the only characteristic that really pulls them all together. Jason Wallace 15:06 And then you said that you're the collections manager at a diatom herbarium. Now I'm familiar with plant herbariums, where people take plant samples and they'll press them in paper, and then they record like where they were recorded and when and such. And people use that to study the distributions of plants and such. I assume a diatom herbarium is similar. But can you explain to us, like, what exactly is a diatom herbarium and what's it used for? Laura 15:30 The diatom herbarium operates very similar to the botany herbarium. We actually do have a botany herbarium in our institution as well, but we're not a part of it just because we are diatoms and just diatoms. That being said, we actually do have radiolarians and other things, but that's another topic for another day of just collections in general, but we have the largest collection of microscope slides in the entire world. So we have about 300,000 accessioned microscope slides. And we have accessioned means that it's officially cataloged into collection. We have a ton of other microscope slides that have not been formally added to our database, given a catalog number, and don't even know, probably another 100, 200,000 of those. And then we have the materials used to make the slides. So when we say materials, it's usually organic or digested material. And what we mean by that is when you go collect an algae sample. So algae is found everywhere, fresh water, salt water, there's even terrestrial diatoms. And you collect the sample, and then to actually see them, and to see the intricate structures of the cell wall, we have to soak them in acid to remove all the organic materials you find inside the cells, because they're see through, we can't see any of the structures about doing that. So then we preserve the materials, which is the digestive material, our sample. And so we have that as well in the collection, and we probably have about 100 to 200,000 samples, and all of our slides and samples are from all over the world, and how they're used is that researchers will contact us if they're trying to study diatoms in a specific region to look at what was there 150 years ago, to see how that compares to what's there. Though, also we have a lot of type slides. So if you get into taxonomy, in order to describe a species, you have to select a single specimen, which is a whole debate in the diatom world that I don't think we have time for today, to use as the type specimen. So we have about five to 6000 type slides. So if you're trying to describe a new species, you want to look back at the original type specimen to ensure that what you're describing is not already been described, and then also to look at comparisons of morphological features. Jason Wallace 17:20 You have the diatom holotypes. Laura 17:22 We have a lot of them. Jason Wallace 17:23 We talked about the game holotype and dinosaur holotypes About a year ago. So, so what's your job as collections manager entail? Are you entering all these into the database, the ones that haven't been cataloged? Are you fulfilling order or is like, what do you do as your day job? Brian 17:37 Is your collection digitized at all? Or is it all Laura 17:40 Oh, boy. So that that word digitized. So yes, we are digitiz ed. We do have an online database, which is a bit of a it's been chaotic. So we had one database in a format that wasn't functional for many years, and then we moved to a different format in which we're having to rebuild it and get it back to where it's fully functional. A lot of our data is digitized in the sense of, we have the metadata. We have a lot of other stuff too, such as, like pictures of the specimens on the slides, which counts as digitized data. We actually have 3d microscope slides available online, so we have scans of our slides that you can operate, similar to looking at a microscope, where you can focus in and out at different, well, not different magnifications, but you can zoom in and out of that scan, which is at 400 times magnification. We also have a ton of other just stuff. We have a library, which we have digitized as well. We have records of that, and I have to manage all of that, organize it, maintain it. I have to care for the slides to make sure they're being properly stored and not getting damaged over time. Repair slide that they're broken. If I can repair them, I have to send loans out if other scientists request that they want to see slides or take images of type materials to send to them. It's a lot. The better question is, what don't I do as the Collection Manager? Because on top of all of that, I also am a researcher myself, and try to publish papers and work on research projects various different topics. With diatoms, I primarily focus on phylogenetics with them right now and taxonomy, but I also do ecological research as well. It's a lot. Jason Wallace 19:06 And so if you remember from our talk about Holotype, I think we talked about phylogenetics and taxonomy there. Phylogenetics is the process of figuring out what is related to what, and then taxonomy is the process of like assigning names and species. And it sounds like trying to tell two species of diatoms apart is about as problematic as trying to tell two species of bacteria apart, which is to say that the natural world laughs at these artificial divisions that we humans have made upon them. Brian 19:32 But they've got all the cool structures. So I unlike bacteria, you've got a lot of morphology to look at, right? Laura 19:38 Yes, they have numerous structures that are so immense that you wouldn't even be able to comprehend how many there are, and we're discovering new ones each day. When we look at them in a scanning electron microscope, we can actually see the very detailed structures of the cell wall at a level that we wouldn't be able to see under a light microscope, we can see the internal features because they have features on the external part the internal part on. The sides, they're held together by silica bands. And even those can have features that can distinguish two species. Diatom taxonomy is really complicated. It's really hard to distinguish them. There's debates about what is a new species, what isn't and then when you start adding molecular data, which is the DNA, we finally have started doing DNA work on diatoms. We're very behind on that compared to other organisms, but we work on that too. You would think that would add more clarity, but sometimes it creates more confusion. There's a ton of cryptic species, which are species that you can't tell apart morphologically by how they look, but they have different DNA sequences, which would indicate they're different species. And there's the ecological species concept of maybe these two diatoms have identical morphological features and identical DNA, but however, they only exist in completely different ecological environments. So are they two different species, or are they the same? Diatoms just are the epitome of all of the issues with taxonomy and what is a species and what isn't. Jason Wallace 20:55 So are they sexual, or are they just asexual? Laura 20:58 They do both. So they reproduce by binary fission, which I think is the primary mode of reproduction. So how that works is they have a top half and a bottom half, those will split apart, and the top half becomes the bottom half for the daughter cell. However, if you think of a box or a petri dish, one half is slightly smaller than the other. So as they produce they go through this size shrinkage. So you'll have a great size variation, which also creates some difficulties when trying to identify them within the same species, and can actually affect the morphological structures as well and how they look. And in order to get back to the original size, they have to undergo sexual reproduction, where they produce an egg and a sperm, mate and then create an Auxospore that can pull silica from the environment to get back to the original size. Brian 21:38 That's crazy. It actually vaguely reminds me of telomere degradation. Jason, explain what that is. Jason Wallace 21:45 So telomeres are the tips of your chromosomes, which is what your DNA is bundled in. And because you can't copy all the way to the end of them, they tend to shrink over your lifespan. And there are complicated mechanisms to help take care of that when children are conceived and such. And that is not my area, so they don't know what those are, but this sounds amazing, that basically every time they divide, they technically get a little smaller, until they finally need to do sexual reproduction. So they could they start over, so they can so they can get back up to normal size. That's just fascinating. Brian 22:14 That's so cool. Jason Wallace 22:15 How long have diatoms been around? I mean, something this diverse and this widespread, I'm thinking hundreds of millions of years silica shells, those have got to be very well preserved in the fossil record. How long have they been around? Brian 22:25 And I imagine from a species depiction, if you're using the silica shell, then you can be doing using the same species characteristics for our fossilized silica shells from a long time ago versus the ones that are out right now. Laura 22:38 Yeah. So the current belief for how old diatoms are is from the Cretaceous Period. They're actually relatively new on the evolutionary scale. So dinosaurs came here first, and then diatoms showed up sometime afterwards, towards the Early Cretaceous period. And the reason we know this is because the silica cell wall preserve so well. They are heavy. So when diatoms die and they lose their buoyancy, they drop to the bottom of the water body that they are existing in. So whether that be a river, a stream, a bay, an ocean, and they they lay on top of each other and create a structure similar to like a sediment core. So when you take cores that which is like a giant cylinder that you can put into the core, pull it up, and then you have different layers, you can actually see how the diatom community has changed over time, especially in water bodies that are more stagnant, such as lakes or bays, we've been able to date the sediment, and that's how we can figure out how old diatoms are. And the current findings is that at the Early Cretaceous period, but diatoms have changed rapidly since then. So what we see from the older diatoms, they look remarkably different than what we see in today's modern times. Jason Wallace 23:38 So quick aside, Early Cretaceous would be probably 100 to 100 and 50 million years ago. I had no idea we'd be referencing holotype so many times on this episode. But change drastically how? like so listeners, if you're not driving, find a place to do a quick pause. Do a search for diatom art or diatom diversity, and just spend a few minutes going down the Google rabbit hole of just how varied and beautiful these little things are. When they're mounted, they're glass shells. You hit them with a light, they turn all these beautiful rainbow colors. I look at those like we have long, skinny ones, we've got round ones. We've got ovals, stars, these weird triangle things, if you're saying they were very different than what they were, what were they? Laura 24:15 I'm trying to think of how to describe it without showing a picture. And they have strange structures. They almost look alien. They have. Some of them have what looks like antenna, weird spines, the areolae or the pores in the cells, can look really strange compared to what we see today. And in my mind, when I think of a normal, diatom in modern time, I have the background to know what that is, but it's hard for me to describe that without using pictures of what the shapes and everything look like. But even the shapes of them back then are different than what we see to now, let me start by saying there's two main classes of diatom shapes, which is centric, and pinnate centric are more circular, and pinnate are more boxy. So centric diatoms are believed to have happened before pinnate. So that's why we'll see more centric diatoms when you look back in the cores, Jason Wallace 24:56 I'm just thinking how every time life hits on something new, it tends to do it weird at first, which obviously is our own personal bias, but I'm thinking of, if any of you have ever seen pictures of animals recovered from the Cambrian explosion, which was when animal life first really diversified in the oceans, about 500 million years ago. I think there's some weird critters in that that we look at those days like that. That was evolution experimenting, because it hadn't figured things out yet, Brian 25:21 so we had the diatom explosion of the Early Cretaceous, where they were experimenting with form and shape. We'll definitely try to find some pictures that we can put up with these, or point people to things on our show notes. So we can say like, this is a current diatom. This is an early diatom, so they can see for themselves how they have changed over 100 million years. Laura 25:41 I definitely recommend doing that if you ever looking for a good rabbit hole to get stuck in diatoms. Is a great one for that. Brian 25:43 Do you have any diatom channels you can recommend on social media? Laura 25:47 I don't know if there's diatom channels, per se, there is the DoNA, which is the diatoms of North America, we have a webinar every other Tuesday at 12 Eastern Time, and they save all of those online and publish them on YouTube so you can watch all of the previous webinars, some of them a little bit more friendly to the novice, and some of them were geared and tailored towards researchers. There's a large variety of the different webinars, and those are fun to look over. There's also Jeffrey stone, I think he has an Instagram or some sort of social media account where he does SEM work, which is the scanning electron microscope. And I'll often show diatoms and talk about them. I think they actually have their own podcast. I'll have to do more research into that and give you the name of what they do. Brian 26:25 Oh, that would be great. So I manage the social media for as it is for the podcast, and I know that there would be a hunger for diatoms on Instagram. There's a whole subdivision of Instagram people just taking pretty pictures of things in nature, and micrographs and close ups of plants and everything, and I think diatoms would hit big. Jason Wallace 26:43 Unfortunately, I think our biggest contender for that, we lost a few years ago. So if you do any search for diatom art, you will eventually run across Klaus Kemp, who, until a few years ago, was, as I understand it, the at least the most famous living diatom artist, possibly the only professional living diatom artist, but he passed away in 2022 but he actually spent years perfecting a glue recipe that would take days to dry so that he could position his diatoms properly. Because there's hundreds of these things, and it takes a very long time. He built custom microscope rigs. People like, pick them up and move them around. There's a video you can look up called the diatomist. I'll link it in the show notes. It's actually well worth a watch. It's only about 10 or 15 minutes long, beautiful, highly recommended. Brian 26:43 So if you want to manipulate a diatom on a slide are you using, like a super pulling, like a fine glass rod into like a little micro point, or like a fine needle, how do you move one diatom? Laura 27:36 So there's a lot of people who've tried various ways to do that. I know actually decent amount about the original diatom arrangers from the Victorian time period. We have a lot of slides by Möller, who was the original or most well known diatom arranger from that time period. And so I've done a lot of research, because there's some of the more precious items in our collection, and they're fun to show to the public, or if we have any events, I've done a little bit of research into his life. And one of the things I've noted most is that the original arrangers all kept their secrets with them and how they did it. So unfortunately, we don't know what they did to create these beautiful arrangements, especially Henry Dalton, who used butterfly scales, parts of bugs and created true artwork. He has chickens, flowers there's insanely gorgeous. I also recommend searching Henry Dalton arranged slides. They're gorgeous. And there are also some diatoms on there that he died to add color to them, but Klaus Kemp was the most modern one, and he has records of how he did it, but how you move diatoms, we have to still do that if we want to do SEM work and look at a certain position of a diatom, because they look a lot different when they're sitting on their side versus when you see them from what we call valve view, which is the forward view. We used glass pipettes that we stretch under a flame so they're super tiny. We tried using that to suck them up and move them around. It's really complicated, really hard, very tedious, exhausting, stressful work Jason Wallace 28:52 that sounds like the voice of experience Laura 28:55 trying to make monocultures for diatoms is one of the most frustrating things I've ever done in my life, because you have to isolate one cell and move it, because they do reproduce by binary fission, and there's not enough DNA in most cells to get quality DNA sequences, so you have to isolate one cell, move it into a Petri dish with medium, and then you just pray that it grows. It often doesn't and just dies. But that isolating one from a live slide culture is just frustrating. But we actually have a student. Her name is Sylvia Lepic, and she really found these arranged slides beautiful and lovely, so she started doing that herself. And she uses a eyelash glued to a wooden rod that she will look at the microscope under 100X magnification and manipulate diatoms that way. I forgot to ask her what kind of glue she uses. I know she used glycerin, plus some lab grade gelatin. Has she tried that as well? But she's actually been really good and has made some gorgeous arrangement just out of fun. Brian 29:48 That's really cool. I'm thinking about these other times where you see the science and art kind of coming together, like I'm thinking about the glass flowers that are on display. I think it's at Harvard, because they're so important for identification. But they don't flower all the time. So if you really want to be able to teach people how to do the identifications, you have to have the flowers, and in this case, the sort of art made with the diatoms. I don't know. I mean, like, if you could make a diatom arrangement, that would be a combination of art and science. Would you try to arrange, like a phylogenetic tree? Like, what would you make as your arrangement of diatoms? Laura 30:18 There's actually example of what I really enjoy about the arranged diatom. So as I mentioned earlier, that we have to see certain features with the different views that you see them in, versus girdle versus valve view is there was Schultz, who was a original member of the Academy of Natural sciences, who made arranged slides, and he would take valves and put them in these different orientations, so that way they could be used to research and to really learn the morphology of the diatom. So I would enjoy doing something like that. There's also Möller was quite famous for using microphotography, where they would take a picture with the names written of the diatoms and somehow shrink it down where they can glue it onto a microscope slide, and they would place individual valves into the circles above these names. So when you go to look at this microscope slide from the 1800s you see a diatom, and under it is the name written down. And I think that is amazing, because back then, he paired up with Rabenhorst , and they actually did do art compared with science. That was amazing learning tool. They were able to help young taxonomists start to learn the name, so they have access to the diatom right next to the name. Jason Wallace 31:18 It's lovely collaboration between science and art. We don't get enough of those, but they're wonderful when they happen in all of this. Laura, do you have a favorite diatom? I mean, you have access to the world's largest collection. Surely, you must be able to pick a favorite out of all that. Brian 31:31 And I actually wanted to ask a slightly different question that's on the same theme. I see that you have named many you've contributed several species. So is one of those your favorite? Laura 31:39 So right now my favorite diatom. It does change fairly often depending on what I'm working on, is I recently published a paper where I described a few new species of Penularia, and one of them was able to name after my former research advisor, Dr Kalina Manoylov. So that's very special to me, because I was able to do something special for her and give her back a little bit of how much she's poured into my life and my professional career. Brian 32:01 That's very sweet. What is the name of that species? Laura 32:02 It's actually not on diatoms of North America, because I need to make a page for it still, because the paper was just published recently, so I couldn't have made a page without the name being officially published. But it's Penularia manoylovy (sp?). Brian 32:15 Okay, well, let us know. We'll point people to it when it's out. Okay, we can at least put it on our Discord. Jason Wallace 32:20 Going back a little bit, you talked about how diatoms stick around. And when I was researching, I came across something that I've run into previously, which is diatomaceous earth, which is apparently dirt made from diatoms. Can you explain to me what this stuff is? Laura 32:35 Yes, so it deposits the diatoms that there was a body of water that had an abundance of diatoms. As it dried up over time, all of the silica would sink to the bottom, and then you just have this massive deposit of pure silica dust, and it appears white and chalky, and it's just crushed up frustules, which is what we call diatom cells. And it has a lot of applications. It's used a lot for commercial use. It's a very valuable resource, and it's also beautiful to look at because it's just a whole bunch of diatoms. And I know of a few things they use it for. Is like a dynamite stabilizer. It's used for filtration to make beer and wine and fish tanks. They use it as an abrasive, so for fine sanding, because it is slightly abrasive, it found in some toothpaste, because it is a gentle abrasive, Brian 33:15 we use it for pest control in organic farming. It's the insects don't want to walk over it or something. I don't know. Laura 33:22 What it does is it gets into the skeleton of the bugs and breaks it apart. So it kind of is like a whole bunch of tiny glasses attacking the bug. Jason Wallace 33:30 Tiny glass knives being shoved into the bugs exoskeleton got it, Laura 33:33 but it's organic and won't harm us as humans. Brian 33:36 Like eating glass. Is it bad for humans, or it's just it's too small to hurt us? Laura 33:40 You can buy food grade diatomaceous earth, and there is a difference between food grade and non food grade, where it's fine to ingest in small quantities, it's not fine to breathe in, and actually can cause lung damage if you do breathe in too much of it, because it is just tiny shards of glass. Jason Wallace 33:55 Okay, so okay to eat, not okay to breathe. Got it also, part of me just chafed at the idea of a silicon based substance being called Organic. Brian 34:03 That's a different episode Laura 34:05 that depends on the definition of organic. Brian 34:08 Yes, it does. Jason Wallace 34:09 Yes, I know. So one of the facts I ran across when researching for this episode is that, apparently the Amazon rainforest gets fertilized by diatom dust from Africa that gets blown across from the Sahara, from where there used to be a bunch of lakes, and they've all dried up. Now, can you confirm that? Laura 34:26 I do know about that. I don't know a ton about it. I know very little bit. But if you do go and you collect some of the sediment off of the top of the Sahara Desert, you'll find diatoms in it. And diatoms are remarkable organisms and can withstand years of desiccation. So there are believed, confirmed instances where they've been able to rehydrate diatoms from the Sahara Desert, which would have allowed for that repopulation if it gets blown in the wind or gets carried up in the clouds and then dropped on the Amazon rainforest. The whole idea of diatom dispersal and how it travels around is a very complicated topic. Jason Wallace 34:57 Okay, Brian, diatoms have just surpassed tardigrades in terms of my favorite cute, microscopic organism, Brian 35:02 okay, Laura 35:03 they don't look like bears. The Tardigrades are adorable. Brian 35:06 Yeah? So, like, what are the Okay, so I was gonna ask about the DNA thing, but then I figured it might be like a touchy subject. I'm also thinking about how everybody's taxonomy got rewritten by DNA. For bacteria, it's mostly settled down the fungi people are going through it now, but for the diatoms, it seems like it's even worse, because the problem now is that you've got a morphological species concept that you've been able to apply back through time, but you can't do that with the extinct ones. So what you're going to have is two parallel species definitions for the same groups of organisms. That's going to make things complicated. Laura 35:37 I would say that is a touchy topic, and there is two different sides or parties that believe certain things. So diatoms are used as bio-indicators, which is the biggest applications for them in environmental research. So a bio-indicator is an organism that you can based on its presence or absence in the environment. Can give you ideas about how healthy or clean or unhealthy the environment is. So diatoms are used as bio indicators, and that's all been based on morphology for the past, however long we've been working with them, but now there's this meta barcoding and e-DNA that's coming up, and you can use that to make water quality research using diatoms. However, you lose that very important connection between how they look and the DNA sequence, because eDNA doesn't allow that connection to morphology, unless you have a reference library that was done through monocultures to be able to compare the sequences, Jason Wallace 36:27 all right? And so eDNA just means environmental DNA. It's DNA you get from, like taking a water sample or a soil sample, instead of taking it from a specific organism. Laura 36:36 So there is this debate on, do we need to connect the data? Do we not need to connect the data? And it can get a bit dicey between people on this debate. And generally, the diatom community is very friendly and cohesive. However, debates do happen in any scientific community, so this is definitely one of them that happens fairly frequently, and there are people who just do diatom DNA and don't really know anything about morphology. So it's a strange and complicated topic. Brian 37:03 I feel like if the diatomologist and the artist can get together, then the molecular and the morphologist should be able to find common ground as well, right? Laura 37:10 I would hope so. And I definitely am on the party of we need to figure out how to connect the morphology with the molecular data. And there are a lot of people that are working towards that and stand in that middle ground. So there is progress moving forward. Brian 37:23 Diatoms united. Jason Wallace 37:24 So you mentioned that they're indicator species, and you mentioned previously that they fix a lot of oxygen for the world. So what else do they do in ecosystems? What other roles are they playing? Laura 37:35 So diatoms are the primary producers. In almost all aquatic ecosystems, if you think back to fifth grade science, when you learned about primary producer, and then the grazers, and then you have the predators. So everything eats everything, and the energy flow through an ecosystem all starts with plants, well diatoms and other photosynthetic organisms play that role in aquatic ecosystems. So they're very important, because without them, you wouldn't have the energy flow through the ecosystem. Jason Wallace 37:59 So they're the basis. They capture the sunlight and it flows through. And because they're largely microscopic and just kind of like the brownish slime that we see on rocks and tree stumps and stuff, we just ignore them, but it's actually a really important component for how energy flows through the environment. Laura 38:15 Yes, and diatoms in particular are interesting because they have lipid droplets, which is oil in them. There's this whole idea to use them to milk for oil. But again, that's another topic that requires a lot of conversation. Brian 38:26 Did you say milk? Are we milking diatoms? Laura 38:28 I did say milk. So when they get stressed, they produce lipid droplets and oil. And so the idea was to get a whole bunch of diatoms in a pool, stress them out, and then milk the oil out of it. Brian 38:37 Oh, wow. Is there society for like, protection of diatoms. This sounds cruel. Laura 38:42 No, the problem is, is, it takes so much energy to get to that point where you actually get a usable amount of oil. Is, it's not really any benefit. It's actually worse than the regular oil that we use now. But they've been referred to as the hamburger of the ocean because they have those oil droplets. Is, they're very nutrient dense, though they're beneficial for organisms to eat them, especially the macro invertebrates or the small fish they eat them. Brian 39:04 Do the lipids contribute to buoyancy and keep them up in the photic zone? Or is that just just, am I just making a connection to something that isn't actually there? Laura 39:14 I have to go back to my plant cell anatomy, but I think it's primarily to use for storage, because they do it when they're stressed, when the environment. So I think it the storage or way to keep them alive under stress. Jason Wallace 39:24 Okay, so what is the weirdest environment that you have a sample from? Laura 39:30 So I don't personally have any, I mean the collection. I think we have some from some hot springs in Japan. My boss here, the curator, Dr. Marina Potapova, has a lot of Arctic diatoms in her collection in some highly harsh environments, that they also look a lot different than what you see, such as like temperate areas I Philadelphia region, but I would say the hot springs probably is one of the most interesting samples we have, because you would think it's quite strange that diatoms can survive really intense temperatures, but they can. Brian 39:57 There's something really lovely about the thin, Brown. Lime layer. And then when you look at it under a microscope, it's this incredibly gorgeous complex. Jason Wallace 40:05 Yeah, I wanted to try to do our own diatom isolations in preparation for this episode, but it's a very busy time with grant proposals and such, and so we were not able to do that, although we have plenty of ponds around campus where we could go get some and I'm sure Brian has some hydrochloric acid or something that we could boil them in to clear them out. There are videos on YouTube that will show you how to do this. Just be very careful doing it at home, because you do have to, like, boil hydrochloric acid or stuff like that in order to clear them out. Laura 40:30 Hydrogen Peroxide also works really well. Oh, that actually you don't have a ton of organic material in it. It's a softer treatment. So any diatom that's widely silicified, we have to use that for but it works pretty well, like 70% hydrogen peroxide, even like 40% hydrogen peroxide, I don't think it's the kind you can just buy from a drug store. I haven't tried that before, but it works, and you do really need a fume hood to do this. I do recommend not doing this without a fume hood. Brian 40:53 Well, then Jason, actually, yes, I have both of those things, so bring me some pond slime, and we can do it later.Okay? Jason Wallace 40:59 okay, so we've talked a lot about the morphology, and these things are beautiful. Now there's a bunch of shapes in the game. It's conveniently they tie the shape to the number of color patches you've gotten. So if you get one patch, it's a circle. Two it's a little oval. It has two sides. Three is a triangle. Four is a square, five is a star. Looking online, I saw a bunch of much weirder ones, where they're like, bulbous, or they're what is the weirdest diatom shape out there that you've seen? Like, are any of these things like weird fractal shapes or anything like that? Laura 41:29 The weirdest one I always think of is campylodiscus, which looks just like a Pringles chip. Jason Wallace 41:34 Okay, microscopic glass potato chip. Got it. Brian 41:38 It's probably very crunchy too. Jason Wallace 41:40 I'm sure it's very crunchy. I'm sure teeth would not like it. Laura 41:43 There's also some too, like Entomoneis, which look like a figure eight, but they're also kind of twisted, Laura 41:45 Like a mobius strip? Brian 41:47 I don't know what a mobius strip is. It's like you could take a piece of paper and twist it on itself, so it technically only has one edge. Laura 41:56 I think it's similar. So they look twisted, and they have pictures of them on DoNA which is the diatoms of North America. Jason Wallace 42:01 There will be many, many photos linked in our show notes people, so you should check them out. Okay, so we should start wrapping this up, which comes to our nitpick corner. Brian's favorite part of the show. Brian 42:10 Oh, I don't know, man, I don't know what to talk about. I mean, they Yes, you get diatoms out of water. Like, that's the thing. Yes, people used to arrange them on slides to make pretty murals. That's a thing. Brian 42:16 I don't think there's much we can science nitpick in this. Like, there's not enough science in it. It's a very science-lite game. I think we can nitpick The one issue, the game pieces are beautiful and they're all foiled. But the problem is the foil actually makes it hard to see the color, sometimes a little bit. So when it comes scoring time, I was lifting up my my scoreboard, I was kind of tilting it to try to get the light right. Like, is that red? Is that purple? Brian 42:42 The patterns of the pores, you said those are the areola. Laura 42:44 Areolae? Yeah, Brian 42:45 Areolae. Those are different on each shape. So you can use they're colorblind friendly in that regard. So they always have a pattern there too. It's not just the color, but you're right. Like the yellow and the green really hard to tell apart if you're in the wrong kind of light, Jason Wallace 42:58 but that's about it. Like I said, it's a very elegant game, very well put together, very high quality, and I find it very fun. I don't know, I've toyed with the idea of going through the single player mode. So single player mode involves a bunch of cards where there's challenges and there's rules so that you can't just, like, play it forever until you get it. You only have so many spare diatoms you can pick up that don't fit the patterns you're trying to do. And they're actually really quite fun. And you start actually on the front of the board, which has all the set little pieces I mentioned, where you can only put a circle or a star or whatever. But the second half, you flip the board over where it doesn't have that, and it's free form arrangement. And so they have some of these where you're making arrangements that look like a tiny Solar System, or ones that look like a face or a tree or other things like that. Where you're putting these together Brian 43:17 Jason is holding up cards of the different shapes. So for those of you who Jason's forgotten that this is an audio podcast, Jason Wallace 43:51 no, no, I'm trying to get your reactions. Like I know our audience can't see, but you can at least react. Brian 43:58 Audience, I apologize for Jason. Jason Wallace 44:01 All right. I mean, that's really it. There's again, elegant game, very well done. So on to grades, and I'm gonna say this is, I think Turing machine was the one where I gave an undefined science grade. Brian 44:10 I think what we need is an art historian to really grade this. I think that this is the wrong class. Jason Wallace 44:15 Okay, I will say the science grade is undefined, but I'm definitely want to give it points for bringing attention to these beautiful creatures. And okay, it does actually do some things right. It gets the shininess of them, right. Well, it gets the shapes right. It gets the variability there. I don't want to give it a grade, because that implies a wrong standard, but I want to say that they managed to make the game and the science mesh beautifully. And I really appreciate that Brian 44:38 we wouldn't have had a chance to talk about diatoms otherwise. So like I said, I'm not going to grade it either, but I'm glad it's out there. I'm glad it exists, not for science. We can give it a fun grade. Well, actually, Laura, what do you what do you think you haven't had a chance to play? But it sounds like you'd be more informed on this than we would be. What do you think Laura 44:55 I'm just happy there is a board game out there about diatoms? Because I'm just happy that diatoms are getting promoted in any way possible. So I'm very thankful for that, and I have seen it before. It does look like a beautiful board game, and honestly, I think it kind of gets the heart of whole diatom arranging, and the really complicated nature is the rules, almost is a perfect analogy for how complicated and complex diatoms are. So I really like the game. I'm going to buy a copy eventually, Brian 45:18 Awesome. Let's see, Jason, I want to hear your fun grade first because you really like this game. In fact, I bought the coffee. But you have the game because you like it so much more than I do. Jason Wallace 45:26 I'm going to give it an A I keep using the word elegant. I love things that are elegant, that have relatively simple rules and yet have a lot of strategic depth to it, which I think this game satisfies. And like I said, it's one of the few games that we've played that has a solo mode where I've actually played the solo mode and enjoyed it, and I'm considering doing more. There may be, there may be, like, 30 days of diatoms on our Instagram feed at some point. Brian 45:48 Jason may not want this shared, but one of his hobbies is stained glass. So I think this is merging his love of highly analytical, optimizing games with his desire to create beautifully arranged mosaics. Jason Wallace 45:58 Oh yes, yes, the fact that these are actually made of glass. Is part of that, taking something from silica, making beautiful arrangements. And so, yes, there is a little bit synergy. Is like, Oh, this is that same thing, but on a microscopic scale, I don't think we've mentioned it. So we talk about all these diatom arrangements on microscope slides. So like a full beautiful mosaic of like 100 or 200 little diatoms in these beautiful patterns is about the size of a period. So they really can only be appreciated under the microscope, or as prints. Laura 46:24 I Think it's even smaller than that, depending on the size of the diatom, because the largest diatom is only two millimeters wide. And then they get much smaller than that. Brian 46:32 Wait they get up to two millimeters.?That's like naked eye visible. Where is this diatom? Brian 46:38 It's over there. Jason, look behind you, Laura 46:40 trying to remember what it's called, starts with an E. Think it ethmodiscus but I don't know. Jason Wallace 46:41 exactly where it's found, Entomodiscus. Insect circle? Brian 46:45 Is that an insect associated? Is that a thing? Laura 46:49 I know it's a thick, circular diatom. Says it's found in the temperate zones of the world's ocean. Brian 46:54 Oh, okay, for my fun grade, I guess I have never go

29. Apr. 202649 min

S3E05.2 - Tic-Tac-Toe (Bonus - Teaching computers to game)

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