Author: Lori Jia
Robert writes:
“Hi Carl,
I like your blog. It inspired me in some way to do the tattoo that I’ve been thinking of for several years 🙂
Here’s an explanation:
I have several reasons for choosing a sigma. The simple reason is that I think sigma is really beautiful, especially when using this LaTeX font 🙂 The tattoo also represents my love of mathematics in general, and of the beauty of abstract patterns in particular.
Scientific American, July 1, 2008
NATURAL SELECTION IS NOT NATURAL PERFECTION. Living creatures have evolved some remarkably complex adaptations, but we are still very vulnerable to disease. Among the most tragic of those ills—and perhaps most enigmatic—is cancer. A cancerous tumor is exquisitely well adapted for survival in its own grotesque way. Its cells continue to divide long after ordinary cells would stop. They destroy surrounding tissues to make room for themselves, and they trick the body into supplying them with energy to grow even larger. But the tumors that afflict us are not foreign parasites that have acquired sophisticated strategies for attacking our bodies. They are made of our own cells, turned against us.
On my first full day blogging at Discover, things are a bit chaotic, but I’d be remiss not to take a second to observe the 150th anniversary of natural selection’s debut. It was today in 1858 that members of the Linnean Society listened to a paper from Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, each proposing that species adapted to their environment as some individuals reproduced more than others. And so begins a marathon of Darwin celebrations that’s going to rage on for sixteen months–on to the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birthday in February and to the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species on November 24.
Allow me to introduce myself by way of a homecoming.
It was at Discover that I started writing about science, a couple years out of college and with no clear idea of what I was going to do. My first two articles came out in the same issue in November 1989. One was illustrated with a picture of E. coli colonies, each glowing its own color of the rainbow. The story described the work of a scientist named Keith Wood, who had isolated the gene fireflies use to glow in 1984, and who went on two isolate genes for other colors from Jamaican beetles.
I have some news for readers of the Loom. For the third time in this blog’s life, I’m packing it up and moving it to a new home.
I would like offer my deepest thanks to Scienceblogs for hosting the Loom for two years. I got to know a great community of bloggers whom I will continue to follow closely as they flood my RSS stream. Virginia Hughes, Katherine Sharpe, Tim Murtaugh, and the rest of the folks behind the scenes at Scienceblogs have always been quick to solve my tech problems while never trying to control my editorial content.