Author: Lori Jia
Jerry writes,
“I was toying with the idea of getting some ink when I came across your Science Tattoo Emporium and was inspired! I’ve always loved water as an element of recreation in both the liquid and solid states. Enjoying a career measuring and predicting stream flow I spend a lot of time in, over and around water. I thought a tat of a water molecule would be just the thing. Talented tattoo artist Rose helped with advice and skill to make my first tattoo an enjoyable experience”
My recent talk in Los Angeles about Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life is now on the web. You can watch it here. The sound is a little buzzy, thanks to my stentorian pipes, but I hope you like it.
Originally published July 28, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Over the weekend I came across a wonderful illustration in a new paper that I’ve goosed up (thanks, open access!). The subject of the paper is the way our proteins work together. Many proteins work by first joining together with other proteins to form what are known as complexes. Which naturally raises the question: how did different protein complexes evolve from common ancestors?
To attack this question, Dutch researchers decided to compare two species in which protein complexes have been very carefully catalogued: yeast and humans.
If I wasn’t so swamped this week by deadlines and hosting birthday parties, I’d be rambling on and on about a great new study that suggests parasites make up a huge chunk of ecosystems, simply by sheer weight. I’ll have more to say in the not too distant future, but in the meantime, check out this post at Not Exactly Rocket Science or listen to a good segment on National Public Radio that also includes some important caveats from outside researchers. If you want some back story, you can read this piece I published about the ecological impacts of parasites in Discover some years ago, adapted from my ode to the monsters within, Parasite Rex.
John Horgan, science writer and director of the Center for Science Writing at Stevens Institute of Technology, has set up a very interesting site. In the 1990s he interviewed a series of leading scientists and philosophers, publishing a string of profiles in Scientific American that ultimately became his provocative 1998 book, The End of Science. Horgan must be quite the pack rat, because he still has all the tapes of his lengthy interviews, and he’s now putting them on line. His latest: the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who championed the idea that science goes through revolutions as paradigms shift.
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