Marc Morency, Quartermaster 1st class, USN, writes: “While I am by no means a scientist, I have been fortunate enough to be paid by the government to get ships from pt. A to pt. B serving in the US Navy as a Quartermaster. I was drawn to the navigation when I joined. In my opinion, it is the only job in the military that is both a science and an art. Celestial navigation has been something I have become profoundly interested in since I joined ten years ago. In this age of GPS, it is, in my opinion, more important now than ever for Navigators to remain proficient in the old ways to fix a ship’s position using a sextant and trigonometry. My tattoo is the visual depiction of how to plot a line of position from a celestial body using the altitude intercept method, a method which has been time tested for more than a century. For me it serves as a reminder that while technology improves, the sea remains an unpredictable place and it is up to the older generation to teach the younger the old school ways of doing business.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Originally published July 5, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

My publisher has been sending out copies of The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution to some leading biologists for possible endorsements when it comes out in October. Here’s what we’re hearing back so far…

“The Tangled Bank is the best written and best illustrated introduction to evolution of the Darwin centennial decade, and also the most conversant with ongoing research. It is excellent for students, the general public, and even other biologists.” —Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University, author of Consilience

Continue reading “The Tangled Bank: “The Best”–E.O. Wilson” →

I will be on the public radio show The Takeaway at 7:20 am EST Tuesday to talk about fireflies. I’ll update this post with a link to the podcast when it’s online. [And here it is.]

Originally published June 30, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

Fireflies are the topic of my story on the cover of the New York Times science section tomorrow. It’s the result of a visit I paid last Friday evening to a meadow in Massachusetts, where I listened to Sara Lewis of Tufts University explain the sultry, complex tale of sex, deception, and death that was playing out in front of me.

I first got to know Lewis’s work last summer, when I decided I wanted to include fireflies in my next book, The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. Lewis co-authored a fascinating review of firefly biology last year (free pdf from Lewis’s web site). I particularly liked this chart, which shows how different species have evolved different flash signals.

Continue reading “Fireflies: The Invertebrate Opera” →