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” →

I think that the next time I’m asked to talk about human evolution at 7:38 a.m. on a news show, I’m going to shave my head the night before. Nothing undermines the authority of a science writer like a serious case of bed head. See it here (or paste this address into Windows Media Player’s URL), and take pity. 

Originally published August 12, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.

Jessica Pikul writes:

I am a Chemistry PhD student at University of Washington. My research is in bioinorganic chemistry, specifically modeling non-heme iron-sulfur metalloenzymes. I am also a Celiac (autoimmune disorder triggered by ingesting gluten). The tattoo on my leg is one of the segments of the gluten protein that I can not digest. The ball and stick molecule is of a Proline-Serine-Glutamine-Glutamine peptide that I can’t break down which then stimulates T-cells to start the fun chain reaction that ends in my small intestine villi being attacked by antibodies. The background to the molecule is an artsy spacescape.

Continue reading “Science Gets Personal” →

I’m finding that my post on science tattoos is getting troublesome now that I’ve added in so many images. Slow to load, easily bugged.

Update: Ignore the stuff below about Picaca. I’m going to Flickr. The home for the set, with comments, is here. And you can subscribe to an RSS feed of sciencetattoo tagged images here, to keep up with the collection’s additions.

So I’m experimenting with an album on Picasa. I will continue to add images to it as people send them in, and will include captions from the comments that come with them. If you click on an individual image, you get the caption with live links back to their source. Let me know if you have any tech problems on either end…

Continue reading “Bringing Order to Tattoo Chaos” →