Like a parasite addressing its host, I gave a symposium talk a couple weeks ago at the annual meeting of the American Society of Parasitologists. When I arrived at the meeting, I listened to a number of parasitologists bemoan the lack of interest in parasites among the public. In my talk, I explained why they were wrong.

People are fascinated and obsessed with parasites, and once you’ve captivated their imagination with tales of zombifying wasps and such, you can plunge into some big concepts that apply across biology–concepts that might be hard to get people interested in if you were talking about spliceosomes or metapopulations.

Continue reading “Parasites Unleashed: Deal Me In” →

Chris writes, “I teach science at a public school in eastern Mass. This tattoo was taken from a New Yorker cartoon that my wife and I both have hanging in our classroom’s (she teaches science, too). Most people think it’s her Dad…there is a resemblance. When told it’s Charles Darwin, too many people reply, “Who’s Charles Darwin?”. It’s kind of sad. I call this Darwin Kong, the establishment trying to destroy Darwin for the same reason it destroyed Kong, it just didn’t understand him.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published July 11, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

Alex writes, “Twenty years ago I got this tattoo of the empty set. I’ve always thought it to be an interesting conundrum, as full of possibility as it is of nothingness.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published July 10, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

My brother Ben, all-around word maven, blogs both at Language Log and at Visual Thesaurus, where he’s an executive producer. He also writes for places like Slate and the Boston Globe, where he just wrote about the word of summer–skadoosh, from the movie Kung-Fu Panda. (I tagged along with Ben for the arduous fieldwork for that piece, along with all our kids who enjoyed it mightily.)

Ben sometimes shows up at the Loom when the discussion veers towards the lexicography of science. So I thought we could help him out. Tomorrow (Friday) he’ll be on Wisconsin Public Radio at 6 pm EST to talk about the word(s) of summer. He wanted to know if there were any science words that are au courant.

Continue reading “What’s The Science Word of Summer?” →

Sometimes a species is so complex, so marvelous, or simply so weird that it’s hard to imagine how it could have possibly evolved by natural selection. Among the weirdest is the flounder.

Not many animals would be at home in a world made by Picasso, but the flounder would fit right in. It belongs to a group of fish called flatfish, or pleuronectiforms, that all spend their adult lives hugging the sea floor, where they ambush smaller fish. Flatfish are teleosts, a huge group of fish species that include more conventional creatures like trout and goldfish. While they have a lot of teleost anatomy, flatfishes also have some bizarre adaptations for their life at ninety degrees.

Continue reading “Dawn of the Picasso Fish” →