Mar writes: “I’m a pharmacist, and I’m doing a Biomedicine Phd. When I began the PhD I decided to have a tattoo. When I was little I used to rest for long times apparently doing nothing. My mother always told me, ‘Leave the atoms and come to the Earth.'”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published February 13, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
I’m just back to my hotel after my Darwin Day talk–a fine, big crowd showed up that included at least a few fellow science bloggers (Bora and Reed, to name two). And if you can handle…just…one…more…wafer-thin Darwin-related experience, please check out my essay, “Darwin Evolving” in the new issue of Time. In honor of his birthday, I take a look at Darwin’s legacy, and the new directions evolutionary biology is taking today.
“We can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history,” he wrote at the end of On the Origin of Species. He saw his work not as the end of biology but as a beginning.
Seed Magazine, February 12, 2009
A natural history museum is really two museums, and when you’re in one of them, you can hardly imagine the other. I don’t know how many times I’ve wandered around the halls of the American Museum of Natural History, among the armored fish and the stegosaurs. But it wasn’t until I was a 26-year-old science writer that I had the chance to pass through to the other side. I wanted to learn about pterosaurs, those stork-faced, bat-bodied reptiles that soared for 150 million years. I found out about a Brazilian man named Alexander Kellner who was getting his Ph.D. at the museum, studying new fossils of pterosaurs from the Santana Formation. Kellner invited me to the museum, to take a look at the bones and talk about his ideas about what pterosaurs had actually been like in life.
Photographer Justine Cooper has taken a haunting series of photographs behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History. Seed Magazine has posted a slideshow of her work, and I’ve written an accompanying essay on the hidden world that lies behind the dioramas. Check it out.
Originally published February 12, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Time, February 12, 2009
What do Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, G.I. Joe and Charles Darwin have in common? They will all be coming to movie theaters this year. The only real person on that list will be played by Paul Bettany in the biopic Creation. And in true celebrity fashion, Darwin will be everywhere this year. In a convergence of anniversaries, Darwin would have turned 200 years old on Feb. 12, and his landmark book, On the Origin of Species, turns 150 on Nov. 24. There will be documentaries, lectures, conferences and museum exhibits. Darwin-themed blogs are being launched, and a cartload of Darwin-related books are being published.