Valentene Peinhardt writes, “I wanted a tattoo that would embrace my love for astronomy and consciousness of being. I remember years ago realizing the fact that we were made of star stuff when I was watching an episode of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series. Since then, my entire outlook on life has changed. Our ability to experience is so cherishable. I am not one of religion, but the feelings that I experience when I think about our origins, are not unlike spirituality.”

You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here and in Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.

(Tattoo done by Steve Lemak of Quillian Tattoo in Allentown, PA.)

Originally published January 27, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

In 1996, while I was traveling in South Sudan, I visited a small hospital in Tambura. People there were sick in all sorts of ways–with malaria, sleeping sickness, and other illnesses–but one group of patients left an impression on me that I’ll never get rid of. They all stayed in a single, small narrow building. They lay on two rows of clean, thin mats on the floor. They were all clothed and were supremely bored. The men kept one pant leg rolled up to the knee. Exactly what sort of disease a sick person has can be mysterious–Is it stomach cancer? Is it HIV? It is mumps?–but there was no confusion in this room. All the patients had a short stick attached to their legs, seemingly tied by a string. That string was, in fact, an animal.

Its official name is Dracunculus medinensis. It’s commonly known the guinea worm. Measuring up to four feet long, the worms were lodged in the connective tissue inside the legs of the Tambura patients, their head poking out of a blister. The only way to get rid of the guinea worms was to wind them onto sticks, which nurses then twisted, slowly and steadily, for two weeks.

Continue reading “The Guinea Worm: A Fond Obituary” →