Are antibiotics weapons of war, or a microbial language for cooperation? In my latest podcast, I talk to Julian Davies about the history and future of antibiotics, the marvelous yet mysterious creation of microbes that changed the course of medicine. Check it out.

Originally published January 20, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

The Science Tattoo Emporium continues to thrive, long after I first wondered aloud in August 2007 whether scientists had any cool tattoos of their research hidden under their lab coats. I continue to get photos at a regular rate, and as I post new ones, they continue to get noticed anew by places like Digg and Boing Boing.

Initially, I was so stunned by the influx of photos that I posted just about anything that came my way. But as the emporium has grown, I’ve become choosier about which ones I post. So if you are considering sending in your own scientific ink, please read these guidelines:

1. I’m most interested in tattoos that tell a story. The most interesting stories are the ones about how people became scientists. I love this one, for example.

2. When you send in pictures, please include a paragraph in which you tell me who you are and explain the significance of the tattoo. I prefer people to tell the story of their tattoo in their own words.

3. If you’ve been so inspired by the emporium that you’ve dashed out and gotten a tattoo of your own, do NOT immediately take a picture and send it to me. I don’t enjoy staring at raw, bruised flesh. Neither do readers of the Loom. Let yourself heal before grabbing the camera.

4. Make sure the photograph is well lit and at high resolution.

Originally published January 18, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

I’m just back from ScienceOnline 2010, a conference unlike anything I’ve been to before. I usually go to conferences where my role is the journalistic fly on the wall, gathering story leads from presentations and hallway chats. Sometimes I go to meetings of fellow science writers, where it’s mostly hard-core job talk (with sporadic wailing and gnashing of teeth). ScienceOnline was a strange merging, where scientists talk about how to blog from a research vessel in the middle of the Pacific and journalists talked about how to teach Hollywood producers about quantum physics.

It is futile for me to distill all the stuff I learned into a blog post. There’s just too much, from the inspiring to the mundane. For example, for good podcasting sound quality, why not sit in a closet with a towel draped over your head? I’m also spending much of today surfing around to new web sites I heard about. Allow me to give a shout-out to fellow Discover-ite Darlene Cavalier’s newly launched Science For Citizens. It’s like Amazon.com for all sorts of possibilities for doing cool citizen science (such as studying fireflies).

Fortunately, later this week you can watch just about all the sessions on this YouTube channel. In the meantime, some audience members have already started uploading their own recordings. Embedded below is my seven-minute spiel. I was part of a panel on “rebooting science journalism.” Moments before I stood up to dispense my wisdom, I decided that nothing summed up the situation today with science journalism better than duck sex. And, as I discovered, ScienceOnline is just the sort of place where the audience gets it.

[More on Uff da here]

Originally published January 18, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

There’s a neat paper in Nature today suggesting that astrocytes, part of the brain’s hidden majority, plays a big role in the formation of memories. The Scientist has details. For background, check out my September Discover column.

Originally published January 13, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.