Patrick Bahis writes: “I’m a math professor at a public liberal arts college, and have had a few tattoos on my back for a few years, but none of these are related to my discipline. Just yesterday I obtained my first math-themed tat, straightforward and simple: the Greek pi is surrounded by a few turns of a spiral made up of the first 95 digits of the value for the irrational number pi (3.14159265…). There’s room at the end to add to it, should the need arise. (Maybe 25 new digits for each new paper published? I dunno…)”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published December 18, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

Madagascar has long been famous for its peculiar biodiversity, from its lemurs to its baobob trees. In the mid-1700s, the French naturalist Philibert Commerson wrote,

May I announce to you that Madagascar is the naturalist’s promised land? Nature seems to have retreated there into a private sanctuary, where she could work on different models from any she has used elsewhere. There you meet bizarre and marvelous forms at every step…

Continue reading “The Island of Fossil Viruses” →

Bob , a software architect, writes, “The diagram is part of the key used on the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques and the Voyager 1 and 2 records. It represents the spin-flip transition of neutral atomic hydrogen, and so provides a universal physical constant, a measure of length and of time, by virtue of the photon it emits. These are the base units on those plaques and records, where we attempt to communicate very precise information without any shared language or other common assumptions. This diagram is part of the ultimate ‘message in a bottle.'”

Carl: More on the spin-flip diagram at Wikipedia.

Continue reading “Ready to Meet Aliens [Tattoo]” →

You go for a swim, and you don’t even notice the tiny worm that burrows into your skin. It slips into a vein and surges along through the blood for a while. Eventually it leaves your blood vessels and starts creeping up your spinal cord. Creep creep creep, it goes, until it reaches your head. It curls up on the surface of your brain, forming a hard cyst. But it is not alone–every time you’ve gone for swim, worms have slithered into you, and now there are thousands of cysts peppering your brain.

Continue reading “The Puppet Master’s Medicine Chest” →

Lisa writes, “These are simple hydrocarbon chains (nonane, to be exact)– one on each wrist. They end on the bottom sides of my wrists. I am a synthetic organometallic chemistry PhD student at the University of Washington, and I got these linear hydrocarbon ‘bracelets’ as I transitioned into my undergrad chemistry program. When I get my PhD, I want to get a tattoo of the first crystal structure I published (of my first unique molecule synthesized)!”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published December 16, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.