Card game, infographics celebrate science

Labs battle for glory

Wannabe athletes have fantasy sports to scratch their competitive itch on a make-believe playing field. Wannabe scientists will soon have Lab Wars.

Marketed as “the science-themed card game where you build up your lab and sabotage your competitors all for scientific glory,” Lab Wars puts participants smack-dab in the middle of the cutthroat, and sometimes morally ambiguous, world of scientific research. To play, participants control a research team and attempt to boost the team’s fame by collecting and playing cards representing both admirable and nefarious actions. On the admirable side, a player’s lab might publish a book of its studies. On the nefarious side, that same lab might conduct a heist and steal research secrets from a competitor. After several rounds of engaging in these activities, the player with the most renowned lab wins.

Lab Wars was designed for both scientists and nonscientists alike, says Caezar Al-Jassar, a postdoctoral fellow at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology and one of the game’s creators. “For scientists, our main aim was to make them laugh but also give them a sense of real-world academic competition,” Al-Jassar tells Newscripts. “For nonscientists, we wanted to expose them to the exaggerated world of academia” while also teaching them about it in a fun way.

This approach has certainly sparked interest online. To pay for the game’s development, Al-Jassar and cocreator Kuly Heer, a Ph.D. psychologist, solicited financial support on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. Their initial goal was around $6,500. In the end, they raised roughly $65,000.

To help his cause, the secondary school chemistry teacher from Melbourne, ­Australia, has released a series of 12 infographics depicting fruits and other all-natural foods alongside a list of their chemical components. These lists of “ingredients” are striking in that they are prodigiously long and contain names that might sound intimidating to a lay public unfamiliar with chemistry. For instance, an infographic for kiwi highlights some of the compounds behind the fruit’s flavoring, including 3-hydroxy-β-damascone, 4-vinylguaiacol, and 2,5-dimethyl-4-hydroxy-3(2H)-furanone.

Kennedy has posted his illustrations to his blog alongside ruminations about his crusade against chemophobia. “I want to erode the fear that many people have of ‘chemicals’ and demonstrate that nature evolves compounds, mechanisms, and structures far more complicated and unpredictable than anything we can produce in the lab,” he writes in one blog entry. Those are certainly words the Newscripts gang will be thinking about as we enjoy such summer delicacies as strawberries, blueberries, and peaches, all foods for which Kennedy has designed infographics.