Had another author told me his publisher was sending me a copy of a book on Escherichia coli, I would have been perhaps quietly unenthusiastic. But best selling science writer Carl Zimmer is a master story teller and superb researcher. He’s also renowned for effortlessly slipping a giant payload of scientific knowledge into the reader, sweetened with human drama, one so comprehensive a student struggling with a dry textbook would have had to hammer into their head over the course of an entire semester.
Category: Blog
Blogging briefly from Chicago. Today’s talk at the Field Museum went well–I managed to lure a fair number of people inside from a beautiful spring afternoon to hear me talk about a gut germ. I also had a chance to walk through the fabulous Shedd Aquarium. The Field Museum has an aquarium of its own–filled with 520 million year old creatures. They set up three gigantic screens on which they have a mind-blowing animation of Cambrian animals–slithering, flapping, wiggling, and looking quite alien. I found it mesmerizing. The animators have a movie you can watch online, but if you ever get a chance to see it in person, do so.
Rachel writes, “I recently got this tattoo as a graduation present to myself. I just graduated from Florida Tech with my BS in marine biology. I’ll be moving to New Zealand in July to study giant squid with my childhood hero, Dr. Steve O’Shea.”
Carl: That’s like a physicist saying she’s going to work with Einstein. Have fun. [O’Shea on Wikipedia]
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published May 16, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
The platypus genome, which was published for the first time last week, has proved to be a Whitman’s sampler of biological treats. In case you missed the initial reports, you can check out a good summary from PZ Myers (and also take a look at Ryan Gregory’s take-down of the bad coverage). But today I just happened to come across another treat that, to my knowledge, hadn’t yet been picked out from the box. It’s a paper that came out today in Genome Biology. It concerns a very cool side of evolution that not many people appreciate. Species can evolve when their genes are modified, or when they acquire new ones. But the platypus turns out to be a great example of how species can evolve by losing genes.
“I am a soil scientist and entomologist. My favorite insects/arthropods are praying mantises, psuedoscorpions and spiders. I am also a big time feminist. I find praying mantises to be so fascinating, and while they are extremely adept killing machines, they are also one of the oldest insects around! This tattoo is a metaphor for my independance and tribute to my mantis friends.From Wikipedia: Sexual cannibalism is common among mantids in captivity, and under some circumstances may also be observed in the field. The female may start feeding by biting off the male’s head (as with any prey), and if mating had begun, the male’s movements may become even more vigorous in its delivery of sperm.