S1E1 - Photosynthesis (Ecological Succession)

Our very first episode. We start with bio-inspired (or just plain biological) sensors, and move on to the game Photosynthesis, which is about growing trees until you harvest them for victory points.  Timestamps: 1:09 - Artificial maple seed sensors3:30 - Plants as land mine sensors5:45 - Introduction to Photosynthesis8:50 - Ecological Succession (or maybe Forestry)14:19 - How seeds move around16:24 - Not that much photosynthesis in Photosynthesis18:12 - Soil fertility24:14 - Gameplay experience31:42 - Grading the game Game results - Game 1: Jason 77, Brian 62- Game 2: Jason 92, Brian 64 Links: - Photosynthesis official website- 3D-printed maple seed sensors- Plants as land mine sensors   Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.   Full Transcript: Jason  0:06  Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Brian  0:12  In today's episode, we're going to talk about photosynthesis from Blue Orange Games. Hey, I'm Brian. Jason  0:23  This is Jason. Brian  0:25  So we're both plant scientists, biologists, and general all-around nerds. And welcome to gaming with science. This is our first episode. Jason  0:32  So, I have been feeling that, for those of you who are just coming to this because you want to try it out, thank you. For those of you who are coming from the future and are watching this after we've become rich and famous and have millions of followers, I apologize because this is our first episode, we're still figuring things out. So things will probably be a little rough relative to the later ones. We hope. Brian  0:51  Yeah, we'll come back and fix it. We'll just replace it with a better recording in the future. And you'll never know. Speaker 1  0:56  You know, we won't do that. We don't have time. We're  university professors, we don't have time to do that. Brian  1:03  Fair enough. Okay. All right. So what are we going to be talking about today? Speaker 1  1:09  Well, I was thinking we'd start off with a fun science fact. And this one's actually related to the game today. So our game today is photosynthesis. And just last week, I saw that someone been doing some bio-inspired engineering. And so a group...I forgot to see where they were from, we'll post it in the show notes. But there's this whole drive to send out environmentally friendly sensors to use to take remote sensing data, temperature, pH, other things that are useful to monitor the environment and see how it's doing. And a lot of people are modeling these off of various seeds. And so this new group has done 3d printing of biocompatible polymers. So they're biodegradable, they're eco friendly, in the shape of maple seeds. And the idea is that the biopolymer, is impregnated with a whole bunch of metal nanoparticles. So very, very tiny bits of metal, they're attached to certain chemical compounds, and they fluoresce. So you shine a light on them, and they shine a different, a different frequency of light comes back out. But the thing is the type of fluorescence the wavelength, I'm not an engineer, I don't know the details, but it changes based on the temperature of the sensor. So the idea is you can take a bunch of these artificial maple seeds that they just print off a 3d printer with the right stuff, you go in, I guess, you distribute them by helicopter or something, they whirligig down and spread out, just like natural maple seeds. And then you can just fly a drone over at some later point and read in the correct wavelengths of light and be able to say, Okay, what's the temperature on the ground right here, and they have data showing that, Oh, as the temperature goes up by five or 10 degrees, then this is how the qualities of it change. And if I was reading it, right--again, not my area--but if I was reading the paper, right, it sounds like out i