loom
Posts by this author
September 5, 2007
Earlier this summer my cover story on the meaning of life (or, at least, "life") came out in the July/August issue of Seed. Now, at long last, the Seedsters have posted the story online. Read it here.
September 4, 2007
"I'm an evolutionary biologist who investigates the evolution of sperm form, sperm-female interactions and sperm competition. So...yeah, it's pretty much about sperm. Wanted to bring the concept of the homunculus to life, as all illustrations of it have always been rather cartoonish." --Scott…
September 4, 2007
Driving home at the end of the long weekend, I was amazed to see a tree here and there along the road with a touch of orange in its leaves. Fall already. And with fall comes another team of scientists to puzzle over why leaves change color.
I've been following this story for four autumns now, both…
August 31, 2007
I've been a bit of a slave to trends recently. Everybody else has a Facebook page, so I guess I need one too--even if I don't quite know what to do with it. Myspace? Uh, okay...
As with so many things in the human experience, great or small, we are not quite alone when it comes to trend-following…
August 27, 2007
Here is a lovely little creature from Sri Lanka, Pettalus cf. cimiciformis, a member of the same lineage that includes the daddy longlegs we're all familiar with. You could call it a daddy longlegs too, but its legs aren't particularly long (plus it's tiny--the size of a sesame seed.)
It may not…
August 23, 2007
As I've mentioned before, my brother Ben also blogs. An editor at Oxford American Dictionaries, he writes about words over at "From A to Zimmer." Not surprisingly, our blogs usually don't overlap. But Ben's latest entry--on very, very long words, has prompted me to pose a question of my own here.…
August 21, 2007
Here's the latest addition to the Loom's science tattoo collection: from a food scientist, the molecule capsaicin, which makes chiles spicy.
To see all the new tattoos, check out my Flickr set. And keep them coming--either in the comment thread here, or emailed directly to me.
If you crave more…
August 20, 2007
I've got a story in the current issue of Science about the challenge of predicting how many species (and which) may become extinct due to global warming. You can read the article here on my web site. I blogged about some of the early material in the article back in 2004 here. For a good summary of…
August 19, 2007
My wife and I were following our children across Appledore Island, reaching a crest where we could see the mainland coast--Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine all stretched out in a single sweep--when a woman in bloody surgical gear stepped out into our path. She warned us that behind the old…
August 13, 2007
Parasitoid wasps (or rather, one group of them called the Ichneumonidae) are the subject of one of Charles Darwin's most famous quotations: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding…
August 11, 2007
I think that the next time I'm asked to talk about human evolution at 7:38 a.m. on a news show, I'm going to shave my head the night before. Nothing undermines the authority of a science writer like a serious case of bed head. See it here (or paste this address into Windows Media Player's URL), and…
August 10, 2007
Jessica Pikul writes:
I am a Chemistry PhD student at University of Washington. My research is in bioinorganic chemistry, specifically modeling non-heme iron-sulfur metalloenzymes. I am also a Celiac (autoimmune disorder triggered by ingesting gluten). The tattoo on my leg is one of the segments…
August 10, 2007
I'm finding that my post on science tattoos is getting troublesome now that I've added in so many images. Slow to load, easily bugged.
Update: Ignore the stuff below about Picaca. I'm going to Flickr. The home for the set, with comments, is here. And you can subscribe to an RSS feed of…
August 9, 2007
A reader writes:
This is my friend, Ira Klotzko, he's got a doc. in Physics and a great sense of humor.
I won't share his original plan for the depiction of Uranus...
One we can share is how he jokes that the tattoo is really accurate because, as is the case with his waistline, the universe is…
August 8, 2007
Okay. So, the other day I asked an innocuous question about whether scientists get scientific tattoos. I also invited people to send in their own example. I didn't quite bank on this site becoming a clearinghouse for science tattoos. The traffic of readers coming in from reddit, etc., is startling…
August 7, 2007
&otYesterday I asked whether many scientists tattooed themselves with their science. The answer is yes, at least for about a dozen people who responded with their own bodywork, which now appears at the end of the post. Here's the latest, from an invertebrate biologist. As a tattoo-free person,…
August 6, 2007
Who says scientists can't write? Moselio Schaechter finds a lovely passage about a lowly fungus from 1884.
Small Things Considered: The Victorian Way With Words
August 6, 2007
The other day I was pondering how scientists tattoo themselves with their science. I was at a pool party where a friend, Bob Datta, had jumped into the water with his kids. Datta is a post-doc at Columbia, where he studies genes in Drosophila flies. I noticed that Bob had a tattoo of DNA on his…
August 3, 2007
My mid-year resolution is to become a more sociable blogger--to point out good posts elsewhere that might otherwise be missed. Today's link: Philip Ball casts a steely gaze at the latest round of papers about the so-called "memory of water" over at homunculus
August 1, 2007
There's been a small, but stunning, step forward in the quest to help people who have suffered consciousness-impairing injuries. Scientists inserted electrodes into the brain of a man in a minimally conscious state. They used the electrodes to stimulate parts of the brain believed to be crucial for…
July 30, 2007
Last update of the day: Tomorrow's New York Times has a profile I wrote about Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist at Harvard. Nowak uses games to understand how cooperation evolved--whether that cooperation is between people or between cells or between genes. I've written about Nowak in passing…
July 30, 2007
The article I wrote for Scientific American in 2005 on the self has been anthologized in a new book: The Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrows' Brain. Check out the book's line-up, which Oliver Sacks calls, "an irresistible guide to this new territory."
July 30, 2007
Today is a day for short updates, rather than deep essays. Update number 1: if you're interested in going to Mars, check out this podcast from Popular Mechanics in which I discuss the challenges astronauts would face living and working on Mars. The magazine will be running a series of articles on…
July 23, 2007
Last week the world press took note of a fish hauled up off the coast of Zanzibar. (AP, Reuters). Why did they care? Because the animal was one of the most celebrated fish of the sea: it was a coelacanth.
The coelacanth is an ugly, bucket-mouthed creature. At first scientists only knew it from its…
July 9, 2007
Larry Moran passes on the rules of the game: go to the Wellcome Library's new image bank and find your favorite scientific image. Here's my pick: the first good picture of the brain, drawn by Christopher Wren in 1664 for Thomas Willis, the first neurologist. (More on Willis and Wren here.)
[Credit…
July 6, 2007
Over the past few years, more and more scientists have been talking about the possibility that life exists, or can theoretically exist, in exotic forms that lack DNA, or perhaps even carbon or water. I've been keeping up with the conversation, and writing articles about it in the New York Times,…
June 30, 2007
For the past few days I've been rushing around, first to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to talk to some people at the Marine Biological Laboratory about the E. coli book, and then on an infinite chain of connecting flights to come out to Aspen to participate in a science-media summit. It's a relief to…
June 28, 2007
If you want to know how a new word gets into Oxford dictionaries, or are interested more generally in the bubbling cauldron of modern English, check out the the first post of new blog from Oxford University Press, From A to Zimmer. That's Zimmer as in Ben Zimmer, lexicographer, editor at Oxford…
June 25, 2007
In the past few months, the New York Times science section has been putting together some special packages of articles, and this week's bundle is on the topic of evolution. You can read John Noble Wilford on hominids, Nicholas Wade on recent human evolution, Carol Kaesuk Yoon on the evolution of…
June 22, 2007
If you sometimes look around and ask yourself, "So what is life, anyway?"--even if you haven't ingested some illegal substance--you may be interested in a story I've written for Seed magazine. "The Meaning of Life" is the cover story for the August issue, which just turned up at my doorstep. The…