The great French biologist Jacques Monod would have turned 100 today. I am personally fond of him for having said, “What is true for E. coli is true for the elephant,” but he did much more than coin lovely phrases about microbes. His work on how genes switch on and off earned him a Nobel in 1965, and he also gave deep thought to the philosophy of biology, seeing it as the interplay of chance and necessity. Here’s a blog post from Larry Moran with more, and here’s Monod’s 1971 book, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

[Thanks to Jim Hu for pointing out this auspicious day!]

Originally published February 9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Here’s the course of Charles Darwin’s ancestors out of Africa over the past 50,000 years or so. It’s based on an analysis of the Y chromosome belonging to his great-great grandson. Details here.

Originally published February 8, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Tim writes,

I’m a post-doctoral cognitive neuroscientist working in MR research at the University of Pittsburgh. I stumbled across the Science Tattoo Emporium and wanted to share my own science based ink.

The attached image shows my second tattoo and the most directly science-themed ink (although the others are also peripherally linked to the career I love so dear). The four hieroglyphic characters are the earliest written form of the word “brain” and are found in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus. Dating back to seventeenth century BC Egypt, the papyrus is perhaps the first neurological case study describing the symptoms of head injuries and the odd fleshy matter that was often visible in the most gruesome of head wounds. These symbols and the story of the papyrus are the opening to the classic textbook “Principles of Neuroscience”, which I first came across when taking an undergraduate course in 2000. In honor of starting my graduate research career in studying the brain, I got this tattoo while attending a neuroscience conference in NYC in 2002.

Anyway, hope you enjoy. Thanks for putting together the gallery that lets me know I’m not the only geek crazy enough to make his passion a permanent part of his body.

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Originally published February 6, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

I seem to have ended up as the Dinosaur Feather Color Bureau Chief at the New York Times. After discovering colors in fossil bird feathers, scientists found colors in dinosaurs last week. But this week another group of scientists has got the color pattern across a dinosaur’s entire body.

Imagine:Silver Spangled Hamburgs of the Jurassic!

Image courtesy of National Geographic. Check out their 3-D version.

Originally published February 4, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.