Nature’s Swirl [Science Tattoo Emporium]

Posted on August 5, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Chris Daub writes:

I don’t know if you are still collecting these, but I wanted to send you a pic of my recent tattoo of a Von Karman vortex street. This is a (reasonably) faithful representation of an image from an actual experiment to produce this phenomenon, from the book An Album of Fluid Motion (hope they don’t sue me!).

I’ve always thought it was a beautiful pattern, and I’m fascinated with how it appears in such diverse contexts in a large range of space and time scales. I work in molecular simulation of fluids, so I don’t quite study Von Karman vortices, but this kind of fluid dynamics is at least tangentially related to my field.

You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here or in my book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.

The New Republic gets Download-The-Universe-ish!

Posted on August 2, 2012November 20, 2025 by Carl Zimmer

This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.

August 2, 2012

Here at Download the Universe, we’re pleased to see a venerable publication like the New Republic give some attention to science ebooks–in the August 23 print edition, no less. In “The Naked and the TED,” Evgeny Morozov takes a look at three ebooks published by TED. His harsh verdict is a lot like our reviews of a couple TED titles (me on The Demise of Guys, David Dobbs on Smile). He even refers to my review in the piece–although he doesn’t actually mention Download the Universe, a shout-out that would have been most appreciated.

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Writing about Science and the Environment: My Fall 2012 Class

Posted on August 1, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

If you or someone you know is a student at Yale, check out the class I’m teaching this fall. It’s called Writing about Science and the Environment (cross-listed as EVST 215 and ENGL 459). You can find out about it on the Yale Online Course Information site, where I’ve just posted the syllabus.

Nature’s Latest Flu Experiment: My Story in Today’s New York Times On A New Virus In Seals

Posted on July 31, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Last September, harbor seal pups in Massachusetts and New Hampshire started to die in droves. In today’s New York Times, I write about what killed them: a new influenza strain that evolved from shorebirds to seals, possibly as recently as last summer. While controversy swirls around scientists experimentally nudging flu viruses across the evolutionary between birds and mammals, Nature has been doing some experiments of its own. Check it out.

PS–The paper is in press at mBio. I’ll post a direct link when there is one, which should be this morning. Update: Here’s the paper.

[Photo of harbor seals in Nantucket by U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service – Northeast Region]

Humans Driving Evolution of the Spotted Salamander

Posted on July 31, 2012May 28, 2020 by admin

Environment Yale, July 31, 2012

Link

“There’s some hopping going on here,” says Steve Brady.

Brady is mucking through a pond. His hair, black dusted with gray, swirls over his forehead. He wears hip-high wading boots, which keep him dry as he wobbles in the deep mud and negotiates downed logs. The pond he’s slogging through sits on the eastern edge of Westwoods, a forest preserve in Guilford, Conn. Piles of tumbled granite boulders and stands of maples rise over the water. Long-legged mosquitoes drift around Brady, looking for a patch of skin. Water striders flit along the pond’s surface to get out of his way. A frog croaks from time to time.

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