Science Friday - Best Science Books and Board Games of 2019. Dec 6, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: December 6, 2019

In a year jam-packed with fast-moving science news and groundbreaking research, books can provide a more slower-paced, reflective look at the world around us—and a precious chance to dive deep on big ideas. But how do you decide which scientific page-turner to pick up first? Science Friday staff pawed through the piles all year long. Listen to Ira round up his top picks, along with Valerie Thompson, Science Magazine senior editor and book reviewer, and Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism program. See a list of their 2019 science book selections. And we have been asking you for your favorite reads of the year. Find your recommendations here! Plus, Science Diction correspondent Johanna Mayer reviews a lexicological classic, Isaac Asimov’s Words of Science.  And, we rolled out a roundup of the best science board games! Some board games go beyond rolling dice, collecting $200, and passing “go.” Newer games have elaborate story-building narratives with complex strategies. And some of those board games focus on science themes that teach different STEM concepts.  Board game creator Elizabeth Hargrave talks about how she turned her birding hobby into the game Wingspan. She and Angela Chuang, whose board game reviews have appeared in the journal Science, discuss their favorite STEM board games and what makes a good science game. Check out a list of recommended board games here!   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. It's here. Can you feel it? Yeah, the time has come for lists. The lists, the round-ups, the best-ofs, the gift guides, the top tens, the 20 must-haves, and beyond. Yes, the year is shutting down, the decade is wrapping up, and everyone is on the prowl for things to carry forward into 2020, whether for themselves or someone else. And here at Science Friday, what we have in abundance is books. Boy, do we get books. We get, I mean, dozens of, I'd say over 100 books a month. And my producers and I are always thumbing through pages. We're dog-earing away. So what better way to cap the year than to share with you? Some recommendations for the best science books of 2019.

And we've got some good ones, riveting histories, intrepid investigations. and stories that will give you a new perspective on climate change, modern medicine, and beyond. So grab your library card, put your local bookstore on speed dial, and pull out that pen and pencil. We've also been asking you to help us. You've come through with some great suggestions like Leonetta in Modesto, California. I've just finished reading Crisis in the Red Zone by Richard Preston. It is the scariest book that I've ever read since his last book about Ebola. It will make you look twice at anybody that you encounter who's sick.

Hmm. How about Lisa from Plymouth, Minnesota? She had this recommendation. My favorite science book of 2019 was The Bastard Brigade by Sam Keen. I love anything by Sam Keen. His books are great. And this one was especially good and exciting. It mixed together World War II, the Race to Build the Atomic Bombs, Spies, and Baseball.

What is Not to Love? Yeah, I kind of like that one. also. So we're going to talk more about all of these books, but we want to know what was your favorite science book that came out this year. Give us a call. Our number 844-724-8255. You make the call about the book, but only if you make the call, 844-724-8255, or you can tweet us in this digital age at SciFRI, S-I-F-R-I. Let me introduce my guests, fellow bookworms, and readers of note, Deborah Blum, Director of MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program, author of many books and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Always welcome to have you back, Deborah.

Thank you. It's wonderful to be back. Nice to have you. And Valerie Thompson, book reviewer and senior editor for Science Magazine, a neuroscientist by training, and she's in Washington, D.C. Welcome to you, too, Valerie. Thanks so much, Ira. We had the Bastard Brigade, pointed out by one of our... listeners. And I thought that was really an incredible book because I like

history of science. I like the history of World War II. I like to learn about all the scientists and the behind the scenes stuff of what actually happened in trying to put the Nazi nuclear bomb people out of business. And it was really, really fun. It was really, really

interesting. I learned a lot from that book. Neither have you read that one? It's really, it was a good book. I did. In fact, when I was drawing up my list, I painfully left it off. I was like, oh, I've got so many good ones this year. I can't do the Bassard Brigade, although Sam Keen's amazing. So actually, sorry, felt great when you brought it up.

And you had one of your own to suggest a historical book, right? I did, and it's midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham. It's an amazing book. And I say that as someone who is not like an expert in nuclear power, but it's this wonderful story of the Chernobyl nuclear. accident in which it's both history, it's science history, it's these amazing descriptions of everything that went wrong and the people involved to the point you start going, man, he got in there in the most incredibly close ways to some of these issues. And it reads like a thriller.

You know, this countdown to disaster and then the countdown to the recovery from disaster, You're like almost always on the edge of your seat. And finally, it has the most amazing details. I did not know until I read the book that the Soviet agency responsible for nuclear bombs and nuclear power was called the Department of Medium Machine Building. And I just love that. Like when reading the book, I'm reading about the Department of Medium Machine Building,

and I think I must go write a sci-fi dystopian novel. about something like that. So the detail of it, it's a fabulous book. I couldn't recommend it more. Yeah, we covered that one on Science Friday. Valerie, you had a different kind of nuclear science. It was the 150th anniversary of the periodic table this year, right? And to celebrate, there was a book, of course.

Of course, yes. So I knew I had to choose a chemistry book for this list, for that reason, but luckily I would have recommended Kit Chapman super heavy regardless. So this book actually gets its name from the so-called super heavy elements. So those are the atomic numbers greater than 103. So dupnium and suborgium and boreum. And these are elements that are not found in any appreciable amount in nature, but they can be produced in a lab.

But even so, we can only produce these very tiny quantities and they last for a few seconds or maybe a couple hours, and they don't have any known uses. So the question is kind of like, why bother, you know? And so I think it's a really interesting question because it hints at this larger tension that exists between basic and applied research. And so advocates for this type of research want to see what happens at these extreme limits of matter. And they expect that these elements are going to exhibit unexpected chemical properties. But then there's these other people who say, you know, like we should really be spending this research money on something more useful.

So the book doesn't exactly wait into that debate, but his historical reconstructions of the early, days of element hunting are just so thrilling. So he tells this example of these two Berkeley scientists who were nearly shot by a security guard because they were driving at breakneck speed across campus at midnight trying to get this sample from the cyclotron to the chemistry lab before it decayed completely. And you're kind of just like, like I said, it's so thrilling. You're just kind of left with this feeling that it's kind of worth doing this work to see, you know, just to see just because we can.

Yeah, that's quite interesting. Let's go to the phones because there are lots of people with suggestions. Let's go to California, to Woodlands. Elizabeth, welcome to Science Friday. Are you there, Elizabeth? Hello. Thank you. Can you hear me? I can. Yes, thank you very much. Love your show. The book that I loved this year came out in January was American Eden about David Hossick,

Botany and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic. I had never heard of him before, but he was the doctor to Alexander, Hamilton at the Duel. He was taught at Harvard in Yale. He collected plants, and he wanted to have a garden with all the plants in the United States in it. He ended up finally corresponding with Thomas Jefferson. He did Linnaeus, and I think the only plates we have from Linnaeus were from his collection. Anyway, he gathered all these plants, put them in an arboretum, so he had the first arboretum in the U.S. and it just talks about how he used them for medicine. Some of his medical techniques are still used today. He was friends with Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson.

I mean, you know, everyone in the New Republic. I mean, it was just amazing how he touched everyone's lives. Yeah, in fact, the first thing, he had it right here in New York City. There is a plaque in Rockefeller Center right now. Rockefeller Center, yes, that's where his garden was. And when that was dismantled, he moved to what is now. the Vanderbilt House in upstate New York in the Hudson River area. And the only thing left there are some of the big trees he planted and the roads.

All the plants are gone. And they even tore his house down to build the Vanderbilt house. But still, he was an American man. It's a great book. It's a great read. And as I say, you can go to Rockettel Center and between all the Christmas decorations. Now there's a little plaque there showing where his arboretum was, the original one. It's just terrific.

You know, the history of science, it seems that there are a lot of history of science books, Deb and Valerie, that are still yet to be read, that a lot of people can read them. Were there any trends in books this year things people were writing more about than usual, Deb? I mean, we're in the era of accelerating climate change. So you see more and more of books kind of exploring the long-term implications of climate change, where it's taking us, is it now? And the book I picked in that regard

is the Ice at the End of the World by John Gertner, which is really just focused on Greenland, and I love it in part because it's not entirely depressing. But so it has a lot of history of science, and going back to what you said, I love history of science, the way that you can figure out how we got where we are through exploring that.

But he looks at how we've, figured out what Greenland was and all these people who risk their life in insane ways to map it and understand the ice and slide all over this frozen landscape trying to figure out what it meant and figuring out that we have buried atmospheres from eons before in that eye. I mean, it's just an incredible story almost of how hard it is to get these climate change facts. And then, of course, he leads us into the now where Greenland is melting away under everyone's feet and the way that plays a role in where we're going with climate change. So it's a beautifully balanced book.

We had here some recommendations coming in on Twitter. We have a book called Radical by Kate Pickert, The History of Breast Cancer, Called Excellent. Yeah. We have Cedric recommends Healing Earth an ecologist's journey. of innovation and environmental stewardship by John Todd. So there is, there you go, another book about climate change. Valerie, do you have a pick that you'd like to throw out before the break here? Yeah, sure.

So I guess kind of on this similar theme, one of my picks this year is Lenore Newman's Lost Feast. So I think this is something, listeners are probably aware that we're in the midst of this, they're calling it this mass extinction, the sixth mass extinction that's happened on the earth. But what I didn't appreciate before reading this book, and what I learned is that the species that we eat historically have had an extinction rate that's roughly five times as high as the background rate. So in this book, she kind of traces the so-called foods we've loved to death, and along the way she kind of critiques our current global food system. So for example, she talks about the passenger pigeon, which went from being the most abundant bird in North

America to completely extinct within 100 years. And some of that was to be blamed on habitat destruction, but pigeon meat was in many ways the first fast food. It was cheap. It was really easy to produce. And that's what really did the bird in. That's great. We're going to come back and talk last more with Deborah Blum and Valerie Thompson. And your calls, 844-724-8255. What books would you recommend that you have read? We have a lot of tweets coming in also so you can tweet us at Cy Fry. And we'll come back and we're going to get more book suggestions. 844-7-24-8-25-5. Stay this. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about the best science books of 2019. And what better way to close out the year than by celebrating one of the most prolific science

writers of the century? I'm talking about Isaac Asimov. He wrote or edited over 500 books. Next month would have been his 100th birthday. And when I was a young reporter, I used to hang out with him at all the science conferences. And he was really an interesting guy to know. Science Friday word nerd. Johanna Mayor is the host of our forthcoming podcast called Science Diction and she wants to recommend one of Asimov's lesser-known

books from 1959 called Words of Science and the history behind them. It's an oldie but definitely a goodie and here is her review. I don't know about you, but in high school I remember staring at the vocabulary section

of my chemistry textbook with basically full-on direct. isomerization, hygroscopy, zwhiter ion. It all just felt so impenetrable. But in his book Words of Science, Isaac Asimov argues that pretty much the exact opposite is true, that those kinds of wonky words and phrases are actually the bridge that brings us into that kind of intimidating world, not the wall that keeps us out. Because these words aren't just conjured up out of thin air, There's usually a reason for them, or a story behind them. So here's how the book is set up.

There's a whopping 250 words and phrases, starting with absolute zero and ending with Zodiac, and a pint-sized story or mini-history lesson to accompany each of them, with just a basic bit of etymology sprinkled in there, too. It's super digestible. Each word history is just a page long. Take the word helium. It turns out that the story behind that word stretches back to 1868, a year when there was a total solar eclipse. Scientists were super excited for this because they'd recently developed this new instrument that could observe the sun's atmosphere, and it worked especially well during eclipses.

So the day of the eclipse finally arrives, and one scientist whips out his instrument, and he notices a super bright yellow line in the spectrum that he hadn't. seen before. And he concluded that the bright line must be coming from some sort of elusive element that didn't exist on Earth and was produced only by the sun. So now, of course, we know that's not true, but they called that mysterious element helium, after the Greek word for sun, helios. It's a great story, but I got to be honest, not every entry in the book lives up to helium. Angiosperm, for example, did not delight. But when you come across the story like helium, it reminds us that science really is baked into our language.

It can just be tough to see that if you don't speak Latin or Greek or Arabic. The stories get kind of lost, swallowed up in a dusty old word that sounds obscure to our ears. Seems like a bummer. But in his introduction to the book, Asma have had this really kind of nice thought. There's a bright side to that. Because now, when we happen upon one of those words and the story just kind of unspools in front of you,

it can feel like we're seeing it for the very first time. You get the sense of wonder and discovery. Yes, many of the words that we use to talk about science are jockful of syllables and consonants can seem maddeningly cryptic and mysterious. But then that's precisely what makes these words so fun. We get to crack that mystery. Not a bad trade-off, if you ask me. And that was Johanna Mayer.

She is the host of the forthcoming Science Diction podcast, which will dig into all sorts of word stories like the one you just heard about helium. And while we wait for the first episode to come out of the oven, why not, sign up for the Science Diction Newsletter and stay up to speed with all that wordy, nerdy goodness at ScienceFriday.com slash sciencediction. Now back to the best books of this year

with my guest, Deborah Blum, director of the MIT Night Science Journalism Program, author of several books, and Valerie Thompson book reviewer and senior editor for Science Magazine. Our number 844-724-8255, where you can tweet us at SciFRI. Valerie, you had a book you wanted to talk about,

about how we talk about kids with disabilities in the CRISPR age. Yes. So we talked a little bit earlier about trends that we've seen, and I've definitely seen an uptick in books about the intersection of human health and genetic technologies, which is great because we're starting to grapple with this idea of human genome editing. But the book I recommended George Estrike's Fables and Futures stood out to me this year because it does delve into CRISPR

and synthetic biology, but it also kind of backs up a little bit and really drills down into this technology that a lot of us don't even think twice about anymore, which is prenatal screenings. So these screenings are often marketed directly to potential consumers, and the messaging is kind of upbeat and says, oh, take this test and be reassured that your baby is healthy. But there's kind of this unspoken part that's ultimately kind of sinister. And so Estrex kind of delves into that, and the reference to fables and the title refers to the stories that these types of technologies perpetuate about what's normal and how we think about the rights and welfare of those who we consider to be disabled. So I think this is really a fundamental

question that we really need to grapple with before we move forward. And it's something that we really need to think about before we start trying to see if we can develop these interventions for genetic disorders. You know, when you mentioned that, you reminded me of a book I really enjoyed that is also on the cusp of science, technology, and humanity. And that is, Eric Topol's book called Deep Medicine, How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Health Care Human Again. And that really was the surprise of this book. I mean, we've been talking to Eric for years. You know of his work.

He is on the cutting edge of medicine and high technology. And what's interesting about this book is that counterintuitively, I mean, he says that high tech can actually bring doctors and patients closer together, whereas you might think that high-tech is going to take the place of the doctor. And he says, no, the doctor will have more time to talk to you because the AI will do the boring but important stuff. Yeah, I think that's kind of the dream, and that's what people have been talking about for a long time in this area. And I think maybe now with the advances that we're seeing in AI,

maybe that's more likely to become a reality. So, yeah, I think that's definitely, it was a great book. Right, Deb, hit it. Hit us up with your next book, Deb. Well, my book is not nearly as positive as what you're talking about. Is it about poison? Poison is always positive to me, I know. But in a way, so I want to give a shout out to Catherine Eband's book,

Bottle of Lies, which is investigation and corruption into the corruption of the generic drug industry, and, in fact, does deal with the way that some generic drug. drugs. And we saw this this year, in fact, with contamination of Zantak, have become poisonous or dangerous. But it's really an amazing book that focuses on, and it has history, the start of the generic drug industry in India, which was really fostered by Gandhi, which I had not realized until I read the book, who was looking for cheaper medicines for people who couldn't afford the expensive brand name versions. And he helped and encourage the setup and an industry. where they would reverse engineer the, you know, the labeled drugs and then make what we now call

generic versions. And then she follows it to the complete corruption, complete's probably a strong word, but massive corruption of that particular industry so that they're not, they can reverse engineer the drug, but they don't necessarily make that reversed engineered drug because it's too expensive and they slide in different ingredients. And it's a narrative story because she's following. this very heroic young Indian whistleblower who's trying to call this out. And it's a portrait both of an institution that has become sort of unbalanced by how profitable it is and the failure of the American regulatory industry to the point, like there's a point where she goes, you know, and people who really know this do their best never to get drugs that are made in Southeast Asia.

And I thought, well, that's not fair. I don't know where my drugs are made, right? Right. So we have to hope that this book, which is really a wonderful story, if kind of terrifying, will lead us to change. I am a big fan. Yeah, and it's a good time to talk about that, too. Let's go to the phones to San Antonio, Angela. Welcome to Science Friday.

Go ahead. Well, I called in for one book and realized that it was from last year. but the one that I appreciated this year was called dementia reimagined, and it's by Tia Pal, and I lost one parent to Louis Body dementia, which is a form of Parkinson's disease, and then my mother now has Alzheimer's, and chronicles through what's been happening with Alzheimer's and dementia, as an aging population, what's happening, and what's going to happen to us, and puts it into perspective, which is there is no treatment. You're not going to get better. It is terminal, just like being born, you're born, and you're going to die.

But she kind of gives you what to expect. And it almost, in one point, it kind of made me feel like, well, yeah, I did all the right things for my dad. I didn't put in a feeding tube. I didn't prolong his life. I made him comfortable and happy. And then the last chapter is reimagining your own death. And basically knowing that if this is in your family, what will you do? And then preparing for it.

And that, to me, was hopeful because it was like, you know, this is going to happen, but this is what you can do. And she was a psychiatrist and became a bioethicist. And I think, you know, with this disease, it has to be what's ethical because you can do a lot of really stupid things and make that last bit of seeing your parents when they don't know you. Very unhappy. Yeah. I'm glad it brought you some comfort and give you some hope for the future. Short time left in our book segment.

Let me ask both Deb and Valerie. First, Valerie, what do you look for in a book about science? What makes it a good science book? I'll ask you first. Well, I think one of the big things I look for, of course, is a good story like anyone looks for. So there has to be a really good narrative in the book. And then our audience, the readers of science magazine, are kind of from all fields of science. And so I'm always trying to make sure that we have a good representation from different fields.

and different types of authors from different types of places. So it's really hard to say, you know, like to give kind of broad strokes, but it's kind of one of those things you know when you see it. Right. And Deb? Yeah, I agree with Valerie that, you know, a book that has a compelling narrative that moves sometimes very complicated science forward, like some of the ones we've discussed here, is usually a really good book. But I also like books that make me either surprise me or in the same.

some way make me think about science in a different way, you know, add a kind of thoughtful perspective to the way it works because, and this I think is true of all really good science books. Science is a human enterprise and we're looking at something where people are making decisions, sometimes in thoughtful ways, sometimes, you know, in ways that are driven by perhaps less noble ideas, and so good science books to me at some level bring the humanity of science to line. Amira Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I have a few minutes left.

Maybe we can have like a lightning round. We can go through some of your books. Valerie, I know you have more to recommend. Give me a couple. Okay, sure. The first one I'll recommend is called Archaeology from Space. This is by archaeologist Sarah Parkak. So this is looking at how archaeologists are incorporating remote sensing technology,

so aerial photography and satellite imaging into their toolkit, and how this is kind of helping us uncover thousands of previously unknown settlements and tombs and fortresses. I think we did that one. Deborah, give me one from you. So I really liked Angela Saini's book, Superior, which is about the history of science, race science, but also the reemergence of it. And I love it partly because its tone is so calm, right?

Even when she's writing about things that you go, oh, that's so outrageous, she never raises her voice, and she allows everyone throughout this sort of landscape to be heard fairly. It's a really good book. Do you have any, you know, this is an era of the intranet and language

and also the era of, We covered books on Science Friday of beautiful, how shall I call them, coffee table books. I mean, we always have some wonderful coffee table books. And they're also very educationally. You learn lots of things. And we had a book about moths that was really, really cool. I mean, a complete guide to biology and behavior by David Lee's and Alberto Zilli. And I had no idea how closely moths were related to butterflies.

Like this one tiny little difference that they were. and actually how beautiful the moths were. And this is a great little book. I think it's a great gift book also. All your books are great gift books. I was actually looking at this book yesterday, and I was delighted to discover that there's a subfamily of moths that lives on sloths. Moths on sloths. They help the algae grow on the sloth, and then they lay their eggs in the sloths poop or something.

But it's just like moths on a sloth. It's like the next children's book. It's such a great idea. That's a free idea for anyone listening. Do you have anything coming up in 2020 we should look forward to? Well, I am excited about Mara Histundahl, who was a Pulitzer finalist for her last book, has a book coming up called The Scientist and the Spy, which is about Chinese espionage of American agricultural products.

And I know that sounds like really corn, but it is really a fascinating book, at least the early look I had of it. And Emily Anthe has a book called The Great Indoors, and I'm a big a fan of The Great Endors, which makes me sound really exciting, I know. So I can't wait to read it. Valerie, you got any books looking ahead? You're reading any that you'll be reviewing?

We're definitely covering the scientists and spy. But what I was thinking about more for 2020 is that it's the, as was mentioned in the segment earlier, It's the 100th anniversary of the birth of Isaac Asimov this year. It's also the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ray Bradbury. And these are just these two prolific science fiction authors and who, you know, have like arguably had impacts on the field of science. And so I'm actually, I don't know of any specific books yet,

but I'm really looking forward to seeing what people are going to write about that in 2020. Start reading the Martian Chronicles and Ray Bradbury stuff too. That's great stuff. Exactly. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today and happy reading. Thank you so much for having me on. Valerie Thompson, a book reviewer and senior editor for Science Magazine, Deborah Blum, the director of MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program, author of all kinds of books, especially about poison. And you can see all of our book recommendations up on the SciFri website, that's Science Friday.com slash best books.

We're going to take a break, and we're going to continue. We're going to switch from books to science board games. We've never done this before. We're hoping to get some great suggestions from you, 844-824-825. We're going to terraform Mars, become managers of a bird preserve. Talk about science board games. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Okay, listen up. I want to know if you can recognize this sound. For you board game nerds, you know it as the popomatic. It's that little plastic bubble you push to roll the dice. Let me play it again. Yeah, well, board games have come a long way.

from the Pop-O-Matic era, there are board games where players create narratives in all sorts of worlds and use complicated strategies to build the story or outsmart one another. And they don't just involve Dungeons and Dragons. There are lots of board games focused on science and STEM. Some involve building a bird preserve or figuring out how to terraform Mars. My next guests are here to talk about some of their favorite science board games, and we want to hear from you also. Elizabeth Hargrave is a board game designer, and she created a game based on her birding hobby.

The game is called Wingspan. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Nice to have you. Angela Twang is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and her board game reviews have appeared in science. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi there.

Nice to have you. I want to invite our listeners if they have a favorite science or STEM board game. Give us a call. Our number 844-8255. You can tweet us at SciFri, and you can find all of the science board games are going to talk about on our website at Science Friday.com slash board games. Let me begin with you, Elizabeth. You created the game Wingspan, and before you worked in public health, you were a birder. Why did you want to create this game?

I had been playing board games for years at the point that I decided to start designing, and really it came out of, of a desire to see a game that I wanted to play that didn't exist yet. A lot of board games do have sort of that Dungeons and Dragons theme or medieval Europe trading in the Mediterranean. People say a lot. And so it really came out of a question of what would it look like to have a board game that was about something that I really cared about. So how do you start?

Where do you start designing the game? What went into wingspan? I mean, I think a lot of people start in a lot of things. different places. For me, it was literally just making up some cards with pencil on scraps of paper and sort of playing against myself a bunch until I had a system that seemed to be kind of working and then going out from there playing with friends, finding a community of folks that were willing to playtest it here in the D.C. area, taking it to some conventions and getting even more feedback. It's really a very iterative process. I think a lot of people don't realize that

board games go through hundreds and hundreds of play tests sometimes before they ever make it onto the shelf of a store. And, and give us an idea of how you play the game. Sure. So in Wingspan, you have a board in front of you. Each person has their own individual player mat that sort of represents their nature preserve like you were talking about. And you are playing birds out into three different habitats. There's a forest and a grasslands and a wetland that are sort of depicted on the board. And those each help you do different things in the games. So one helps you get food, one helps you get eggs, one helps you get more cards.

And as you're playing birds out, they help you get better and better at those three things. Angela, you, Winkspan was on your list of games. Why do you like this game so much? Well, for me, I think it very accurately portrays aspects of bird ecology, but in a very accessible way. I think it's easy to explain to players what's going on in the game in terms of you know you're trying to attract birds to your preserve but you just need to get the resources that represent their diets and I found that it's an easy game to explain

but there's also a lot of depth and the types of kind of table conversations that have arisen from this game have just been fantastic you are a big board gamer or correct that would be correct in saying that What makes a good science board game? Well, I think first and foremost, you want to have a fun game. You want some sort of game that people are willing to come back to. And I think part of that comes from games that have multiple strategies for victory,

maybe an element of surprise, maybe some sort of puzzle-like component that you have to solve in a different way each time. And I think games work best as science games when they not only have a science theme, but they also incorporate the educational component as part of the game mechanics. And so it's not just about, you know, assigning certain names and jargon to the game pieces, but hopefully the act of playing the game actually teaches the scientific process to the players. Let's go to some of our gamers out in our audience. Let's go to Orlando, George.

Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks. I wanted to mention a game called Evolution. Evolution uses resource management, which can bring in non-science-enterousy people, but then it really cleverly introduces the idea of natural selection to build new organisms to compete for those resources. Yeah, that's a good game. Thanks for bringing that up. We played that.

Our SciFri team played it in the office as research yesterday for this. Elizabeth, describe the game for us if you can. Sure. In evolution, you have control of species, and each one starts out with any particular traits, but you can play cards onto them that give that particular species a certain trait, like a long neck, which helps it get food, or burrowing, which helps it resist predators and things like that. So you can sort of modify the animals that you're controlling over time in reaction to, how many other players have carnivores or how much food is available in the system.

And so you're just competing to eat the most food over the course of the game with your different species as you have adapted them. Now, Angela, you have a PhD in evolution and ecology, right? That's correct. This board game, there's a version of evolution where you can throw climate change into the mix? Yeah. That's an expansion to the evolution game that Elizabeth Johnson. described and to me I really enjoy that extra layer and so I enjoy evolution a lot and I still play it actually as the video game version on Steam a lot these days

and I think we'll find over time that in the base game it's it's kind of hard to take down a really big predator that's got these really great complex traits and so the cool thing about the climate change expansion is that it brings in these an abiotic component, so climate, and in general, like larger species tend not to do as well with heat and colder and smaller species don't like the cold as much. And so by manipulating the climate, players can actually, you know, there's a way, there's a strategy to actually deal with these large species as well. So it kind of changes your strategy a little. Do you think that these are teaching materials if you want to teach kids about climate, you play the game, or

Are they just merely for fun? I think evolution is maybe a little complicated to bring into a classroom. It depends on how much time you have. As I mentioned, it does have a video game counterpart, and so I think that one might be, if there's some way to bring that into a classroom, you can definitely fit it in within the time span. I have to get my steam up on that one. That sounds like an interesting one.

Let's go to the phones. Let's go to Cherryville, Connecticut, and Kyle. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for taking my call. I highly appreciate it. You're welcome. The game I wanted to bring up that I got into about three years ago was called Pandemic, and it's all about viruses spreading across the world,

and you're trying to work with the other players that have special roles to eliminate these viruses from the world. And if viruses appear too many times in the game, it's game over, and you have to start over from a brand new. game. Yeah. Yeah, we had a couple of tweets of people just tweeting, and they recommended that one also, Elizabeth. What do you think about that game? Were you an advisor on that game? No, that's not the field of health care policy that I was involved in at all. But yeah, I mean, I think the color described it well. And that was probably one of the first games that I played that had sort of a more real-world, modern-day feeling theme to it with that STEM component. to it. And I just, I love that games for us serve as escapism,

but I also really enjoy when that escapism links back to something that's real in the world and that you're sort of experiencing something that you might not otherwise experience. So you get that feeling of tension. I'm like, oh my gosh, we have to save these people. These pandemics are raging across the world, but within the confines of your table. Interesting. Let me go to our Science Friday Vox Pop app, and we had some comments there, like this one from Scott from Reno.

My favorite STEM board games are from a publisher called Genius Games. There is a sequence of biology-themed games. There's peptide, virulence, and cytosis, cytosis being my favorite of those three, and then some sort of physics and chemistry games called covalence, ion, subatomic, and periodic. And my favorite of all of those is periodic. Periodic, Angela, do you agree? good game. I've played subatomic and cytosis, and I agree the games that genius games comes out with are really educational, and they are really fun and engaging.

Let's see if we have another clip from our Science Friday Vox Pop. Let's go to Jose. So I use fantastic gymnastics in my AP physics course. It's an uneven bar, and there's a gymnast, and you spin them around. My students have to predict using rotational. kinematics and projectile motion, where the gymnast is going to land. It's a lot of fun, and it's fun to watch them do the calculations. So he uses it in his physics class.

I think that's kind of interesting. That was the game Fantastic Gymnastics. And as I say, a lot of these games, they can be used for teaching, and they can be used for fun. Let me see lots of tweets coming in. Susan says, a birder for 30 years, and wingspan to me is almost as good as actual birding. That's pretty high praise. Here's Cameron who says,

it may sound weird, but I love the way that dead of winter plays, like a climate change allegory, acted out with zombies rather than catastrophic flooding. Familiar with that one? I am. I hadn't thought about that as sort of a warning

parable, but I could see how you would go there with it. Do you see a trend in any games? Are we getting more climate change games? or games that are apocalyptic in terms of the future of climate change? Well, there was sort of a, there was a whole trend of zombie games a few years back that of winter was part of. But in terms of climate change, so we have evolution climate,

and I do think there are a couple more coming out in the next year or so that I've heard about. And, you know, we want games to be fun, so it's tricky to come up with a design that people still have fun with and don't leave totally depressed. over while still addressing some of these issues. And I think pandemic struck that balance because you feel really successful when you win the game because you have quashed the pandemic. So I think to the extent that climate change games can give people that same feeling of like this is a thing we can work on together.

That might be a really interesting way to go. Talking with Elizabeth Hargrave and Angela Chuang on Science Friday from WNYC, studios. And let me go to the phones because we have an unusual request from Jerry in Bowling Green Kentucky. Hi, Jerry. Oh, this is Gary. Go ahead.

Yeah. Got a grandson who's almost four, but he's showing a real bent on things, environmental signs such as that. Is there a toddler board game that can use for, like, for pre-K children? Thank you. Yeah, thank you for calling. Do we have any recommendations for a toddler? That's

kind of young. So there are definitely board games aimed at that age group. I'm racking my brain whether any of them, you know, fit clearly into the STEM realm. One company that I'd recommend that's really well known for their children's games is called HABA,

H-A-B-A, and they have a line of games their earliest ones started recommending, I think, age two or three. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Settlers of Katan is a popular board game. It's one of my favorites,

if it's not necessarily sciencey, but I understand there is a version where you can add in oil spills called Catan Scenario's Oil Springs. Is that right? You now got oil spills? Add it to that? I missed that add on. Yeah, that's correct.

And so it doesn't quite function like some of the larger expansions in Catan that some people might be familiar with, like cities and knights. Yeah. So it is a scenario, which means it's, you know, like a small cardboard expansion that you buy and print out and you just play along with your base game. And what's interesting about this scenario is that it introduces a new resource to the mix, to the additional five. It introduces oil, and the kick to it is the

more you use oil in the game, the more players progress along an environmental disaster track. And so whenever any player uses oil, everyone kind of moves closer to an environmental disaster. And these disasters can be anything from, you know, wiping away all of the smaller settlements along the edges of the board that are bordering the ocean or removing some of the resource hexes in general. Interesting. Elizabeth, I know on your list of games is something called terraforming Mars. It sounds like something Elon Musk might be involved in. Tell us about that. Sure.

Terraforming Mars is a big, heavy board game. It takes a few hours to play at least your first time. But you literally are doing things in the game that raise the oxygen level and the amount of water and the temperature on the surface of Mars. And you're doing this mostly by playing cards that are related to actual things that you might do to increase those things. And so even though it's this very futuristic sort of sci-fi idea, it feels very realistic in terms of the activities that you're doing within the game. I have a tweet here from David who asks, how about CO2? It's a game of managing climate change. It's not very well known.

Some call it terraforming Earth. Yeah, that's another big, long, heavy game that's not definitely not for beginners. But that's true. That's another one that has approached that issue of climate change. And similar to the Catan expansion we were just talking about, it's really getting into the issues of the tragedy of the commons. And, you know, you want to use oil because it's good for you personally, but it's making everything a little bit more dangerous for everyone across the board at the same time.

I want to thank both of you, Elizabeth Hargrave, board designer and creator of the game Wingspan and Angela Twang. Chwang, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee in Knoxville. All our board game reviews have appeared in science. Hers are there. And we have all the Science Friday games we talked about up on our website, science friday.com slash board games. And we also have the Science Friday Voxpop app, and we're hard at work on our big end-of-year show,

and we need your help. Tell us what science story or discovery you remember most from the last 10 years, Your biggest science story of the decade, what do you think? Tell us, Science Friday Vox Pop app. You could be included in our big end of year, end of decade. Science wrap-up, download the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. We want to know what discovery or science story you remember most from the last 10 years. Have a great gaming weekend.

Hope we gave you some ideas for having fun. I'm Ira Flato in New York.