loom | August 11, 2007I 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 take pity.
loom | 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 of the gluten protein that I can not digest. The ball and stick molecule is of a Proline-Serine-Glutamine-Glutamine peptide that I can't break down which then stimulates T-cells to start the fun chain reaction that ends in my small intestine villi being attacked by antibodies. The background to the…
loom | August 10, 2007I'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 sciencetattoo tagged images here, to keep up with the collection's additions.
So I'm experimenting with an album on Picasa. I will continue to add images to it as people send them in, and will include captions from the comments that come with them. If you click on an individual image, you get the caption with…
loom | August 9, 2007A 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 always expanding.
Into the science tattoo hall of fame it goes...
loom | August 8, 2007Okay. 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 enough. But the stream of tattoo pictures coming into my inbox is causing me to freak out, ever so slightly. Seriously, think about this: people with Ph.D.'s, who study esoteric aspects of physics and insect neurology are baring flesh, snapping pictures, and sending them to me, a stranger. Just…
loom | 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, I keep wondering, when does the screaming stop?
loom | August 6, 2007Who 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
loom | August 6, 2007The 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 shoulder. At first I thought it was a generic snippet of the molecule, but then Bob told me that it actually represents, in the genetic code, his wife's initials: EEE. Geek love in its noblest form. [For the gorey specifics, see Bob's comment below.]
Bob's tatoo reminded me that I have seen other…
loom | August 3, 2007My 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
loom | August 1, 2007There'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 binding together the brain into an aware state. As the doctors hoped, the stimulation made the man more responsive. He was able to name objects and to hold a cup to his lips. The details of the experiment appear in this week's issue of Nature.
One experiment on a single subject is a far cry from a…
loom | July 30, 2007Last 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 before--his work on language evolution turns up in my book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, and there's a bit on his research on cancer evolution in an article I wrote last year for in Scientific American. But I was very curious to talk to Nowak and figure out how all these topics fit inside the…
loom | July 30, 2007The 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."
loom | July 30, 2007Today 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 the future space travel, including one by me on the Red Planet. (NB: contrary to how PM introduces me, I am not officially "New York Times astrobiology reporter." The Times just lets me write about life elsewhere when a cool story arises.)
loom | July 23, 2007Last 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 fossils, the youngest of which was 70 million years old. In 1938, however, a flesh-and-blood coelacanth was dredged up near East London, South Africa. The five-foot long beast had many of the hallmarks of fossil coelacanths, such as hollow spines in their vertebrae, peculiar lobe-shaped fins, and a…
loom | July 9, 2007Larry 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: Wellcome Institute, Creative Commons License.]
loom | July 6, 2007Over 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, Discover, Popular Mechanics, and, most recently, in Seed.
Today I report in the New York Times that a panel of scientists arranged by the National Academies of Sciences has issued the first official weird life report. They're calling for a more aggressive search for strange forms of life. You can…
loom | June 30, 2007For 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 be finally sitting down in one place, and the view of the mountains from here making blogging very fine. But until my blood thickens up a little, I probably won't be writing much.
As I've been driving and flying and driving again, I've gotten some emails from readers, pointing me to new papers that…
loom | June 28, 2007If 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 University Press, and brother.
loom | June 25, 2007In 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 animal development, and more. No animals for me, thanks--I got the microbes. Which is just fine with me. It's a world of evolution I get all to myself.
In my article, I take a look at experiments in which scientists watch microbes evolve, testing out hypotheses about natural selection and other…
loom | June 22, 2007If 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 story isn't online yet, but when it does pop up, I'll make a note of it.
The idea for the story crystallized during the course of my work on my next book. My initial idea for the book was to investigate this very question, "What is life?" There is actually a lot of new research and thinking going into…