Something strange recently happened to me in Tennessee. I wasn’t actually in Tennessee when it happened. The strangeness emanated from there–actually, from one spot in Tennessee–and eventually reached me here up in New England.

It started with a column I wrote in the October issue of Discover, about the evolution of the human face. Sometimes people write letters to the magazine about my pieces. My editors dropped a note to let me know that all at once they got 40 60 letters about my column. All from the outskirts of Memphis. All pretty much identical in style and substance.

Continue reading “The Evolution of the Face: A Letter to Some Readers in Tennessee” →

Loren, a biology graduate student, writes, “It’s a sketch of the horseshoe crab Limulus, such as a zoologist would make (and with the abdominal segments correctly identified). Perhaps the most magnificent living fossil of all, the horseshoe crab is the survivor of a lineage that extends back some 445 million years into the Ordovician. The four extant species are the only living representatives of the ancient arthropod class Merostomata and the only known chelicerate crabs.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published December 15, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

Here’s the list. (And here’s the book.)

[Update–fixed the paper’s title. Sorry, people of Cleveland.]  

Originally published December 14, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

Frank writes, “Hey there! I didn’t tattoo science, science tattooed me! I’m coming up on being five years free of testicular cancer thanks in part to this tiny tattoo that helped the technicians correctly align my Guidant radiation treatments.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published December 12, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

Barack Obama has picked Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at Berkeley as his Secretary of Energy. This will be interesting–what happens when you put a Nobel-prize winning scientist in charge of a government department? Here’s one prediction: expect a lot of synthetic biology. Practically nobody has heard of synthetic biology today, but that will probably change. 

Originally published December 11, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.