As I’ve mentioned before, my brother Ben also blogs. An editor at Oxford American Dictionaries, he writes about words over at “From A to Zimmer.” Not surprisingly, our blogs usually don’t overlap. But Ben’s latest entry–on very, very long words, has prompted me to pose a question of my own here.

In his post, “Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism!”, Ben points out that a lot of the longest words are, as he puts it, “stunt words.” They’re cobbled together from prefixes and suffixes, but never actually used in real life. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism is a case in point–a word that is used to describe long words.

Continue reading “I see your hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism and raise you a ribulosebisphosphatecarboxylaseoxygenase” →

Here’s the latest addition to the Loom’s science tattoo collection: from a food scientist, the molecule capsaicin, which makes chiles spicy.

To see all the new tattoos, check out my Flickr set. And keep them coming–either in the comment thread here, or emailed directly to me.

If you crave more science tattoos–not just on the body, but of the body, check out an awesome collection of anatomical tattoos. (Thanks to Steve)

Continue reading “The Ink Keeps Spilling” →

I’ve got a story in the current issue of Science about the challenge of predicting how many species (and which) may become extinct due to global warming. You can read the article here on my web site. I blogged about some of the early material in the article back in 2004 here. For a good summary of the qualms many scientists have about the power of current models, check out this recent review in the journal Bioscience: pdf.

[Update: If for some reason you have trouble reading my article on my web site, the link to the story at Science is here.]

Continue reading “Forecasting Extinction” →

My wife and I were following our children across Appledore Island, reaching a crest where we could see the mainland coast–Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine all stretched out in a single sweep–when a woman in bloody surgical gear stepped out into our path. She warned us that behind the old radar tower next to us some pathologists were cutting open a seal. It would be a good idea if we steered the children away.

Naturally, I let my wife head on with the kids and snuck around the tower to check out the necropsy for myself…

Continue reading “Voyage to Organism Island” →

Parasitoid wasps (or rather, one group of them called the Ichneumonidae) are the subject of one of Charles Darwin’s most famous quotations: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”

Scientists have learned a lot more about parasitoid wasps since Darwin wrote about them in 1860, and their elegant viciousness is now even more staggering to behold. Not only do they devour their hosts alive from the inside out, but they also manipulate the behavior of their hosts to serve their own needs (see my post on zombie cockroaches for one particularly startling example).

Continue reading “Imagining My Homicidal Liver” →