Rebecca writes:

“Attached is a picture of my science tattoo. It is a Marsh Pick, with a series of Pentaceratops vertebra, and a blue peace sign. I am a vertebrate paleontologist and geologist who works on ceratopsid dinosaurs. Since I am a southerner, I choose a southern species of ceratopsian (Pentaceratops sternbergi), from New Mexico. I love the color blue, so I went with the blue peace sign. The whole design is based after the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, but altered to fit my specific passions.”

Continue reading “Peace, Picks, and Dinosaurs” →

I’m going to be posting my blogroll to my new digs as soon as I get the chance. And to that list I will be adding BdellaNea. It’s the work of Mark Siddall, a scientist at the American Museum of Natural History who specializes in leeches.

I wrote about Mark in this 2006 article for the New York Times, and last weekend at the meeting of the American Society for Parasitologists we caught up briefly. He’d been off to Zambia and various other seething leech hot spots since I’d last seen him, and at the meeting he and his students were presenting lots of new research, including some insights into how different species of leeches thin your blood.

Continue reading “A Leech Blog. If You Build It, We Will Come.” →

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.

Continue reading “Never Forget Your Inner Mathematician” →

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.

Continue reading “Scared? Nah, just busy” →