Anna writes, “I’m a geology student at UCSC and I got to thinking what tattoo would really encapsulate the major, regardless of what I do with it. Plate tectonics is the driving force behind all geologic processes; it’s crazy to me how young the science is. So I got a tattoo, a map of the world with plate boundaries and the direction of their motion, along with a 3D image of a cross section of a subduction zone.”

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

Originally published December 29, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.

How, you may be asking yourself, is a good sense of direction like a bad case of acne?

Over many decades, psychologists have measured the minds of men and women, looking for similarities and differences. Reliable results are notoriously hard to come by, because it can be very easy to find differences where none really exist. If you decided in 1970 to look at the fraction of scientific and medical Ph.D. awarded to women–under 5 percent–you might conclude that women’s brains just weren’t suited to the task. Today, that figure has reached about 50 percent. Women’s brains haven’t evolved over the past 40 years. Their social environment has.

Continue reading “Of Men, Navigation, and Zits” →

My comment policy at the Loom can be summed up with three words: light but firm.

Science writing often triggers intense reactions in readers–whether the subject is evolution, the biology of the brain, global warming, or genetic engineering. I believe readers should feel free to express those reactions–within reason–on my blog.

I actually find many of these comments useful to my own work. Sometimes people fact-check me and show me where I’ve made a mistake. Other times, they point me to a line of research that’s new to me. I’ve actually ended up writing magazine articles based on those helpful suggestions. (There is no copy-editor looking at this blog, so I appreciate notes about typos, which I will remedy quickly.)

Continue reading “The Loom’s Comment Policy” →

When things get small–like millionths-of-an-inch small–they get very interesting. The ordinary rules of physics we’re used to fade back as the oddness of quantum physics looms large. Engineers have taken advantage of this fact by fashioning tiny bits of matter, known as quantum dots, that behave in all sorts of useful ways. For example, quantum dots made from cadmium telluride will respond to ultraviolet light by giving off a flash of visible light–the color depending on their size. If you attach certain molecules to cadmium telluride quantum dots, they will latch onto certain targets, making it possible to detect trace amounts of substances ranging from pesticides to cancer cells.

As versatile as cadmium telluride quantum dots are, however, they’re not easy to make. It’s especially tedious to fashion them so that they’re not toxic to living cells, since both cadmium and tellurium are nasty metals. In the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology, a group of scientists at Kings College London offer a remarkably easy way to make them.

Continue reading “The Quantum Earthworm” →