“Hey there Carl,”My tattoo is from an Irving Geis illustration of DNA. I was attracted to his attention to the molecular detail while also drawing in a representational spiral that doesn’t ignore the basic beauty of the double helix.

“This particular sequence (I’ve BLASTED) is too short to be specific to only one gene, but one human gene it’s found it is the 5′ UTR of one of our tight junctions.

“Pat Fish in Santa Barbara, CA did it for me with great skill.”

-Matthew MacDougall, 4th year medical student

Continue reading “Tight Junction Gene” →

“here is a photograph of the one my boyfriend offered me three years ago. Although I don’t work directly on the Burgess Shales fossils, they are some of the coolest fossils around, and a summary of what is so fascinating in paleontology and evolutionary biology…” –Mag

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published February 17, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

“I don’t quite have a science tattoo, but I have a math tattoo. That’s close enough, right?”Now, for the explanation. This is a formula called the Y Combinator. It is a fixed-point combinator in the lambda calculus and was discovered by Haskell Curry, a rather prolific mathematician and logician whose work helped start Computer Science.

“What this formula does is calculates the fixed point of a function, which in turn allows for recursion by calling on that fixed point; recursion is perhaps the single most important concept in Computer Science. Being a computer scientist and a mathematician, this formula is very important to me and represents the innate beauty of computer science and mathematical logic.” –Mark

Continue reading “Y combinator” →

Amanda, a biologist, writes, “Here’s my science tattoo. It’s inspired from the REM song Man on the Moon and by trip to the Galapagos a few years ago.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published February 17, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

“I got this on Saturday, that’s it fresh off the needle. When it’s healed I’ll try and take a full arm shot so you can see it all. the artists original design had ‘seek and you will find’ but that’s too close to the biblical reference ‘..shall find’ so i changed it to just ‘seek seek seek’ on the banner. you’re not always gonna find your answers but you should always be looking for some.” –Damien

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published February 17, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.