Author: Lori Jia
A grad student who asked to remain anonymous writes, “The tree seems to be a potent symbol of life in human (at least Western) culture, and what better way to augment this symbol by putting the code for life (DNA) at its base? I got this tattoo to commemorate the beginning of my PhD in immunology.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published February 6, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
The book costs $8,539. The reviews on Amazon are priceless.
(Hat tip, Dr. Prerogative of Harlots)
Originally published February 5, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
A week from today Charles Darwin turns 200. On his birthday I will be enjoying a brief escape from this harsh New England winter in the temperate climes of North Carolina. I’ll be giving a talk at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, entitled “Darwin and Beyond: How Evolution Is Evolving.” I’ve got a couple big articles in the pipeline next week about Darwin, and they’ll be the raw material for my talk.
The talk is free, but the museum does ask that folks pre-register. If you can’t make it, you can still catch the talk when it’s posted online (details to come). More information is available at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (one of my hosts) and at the museum site.
There’s a particular kind of blog post I enjoy–the kind that sounds just like one of those enjoyable rants you hear from a friend in a bar. These rants are loud, funny, impassioned, and surprisingly coherent given the site of said rants. So it is with a remarkable feeling of deja vu (deja lu?) that I read a blog post from Chris Norris, who manages the vertebrate paleontology collection at the Peabody Museum at Yale. Yesterday I had a drink with Chris, and he began to inveigh against the evils of stolen fossils, explaining how any scientific contact with them whatsoever is like the fruit of the poison tree.
If you take a look at a whale or dolphin–any whale or dolphin anywhere on Earth–it will follow certain rules. It will have a blowhole. It will not have legs. It will have horizontal tail flukes it raises and lowers to swim (as opposed to fish that bend from side to side). And it will have been born tail first (as opposed to the head-first position of land mammals). These sorts of rules set whales and dolphins off from other living animals, but only if you look at life as it is today. If you move back in time–especially back between about 50 million and 40 million years ago–the rules collapse.