Author: Lori Jia
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…
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.
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.
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.
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”