Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait reveals some of the astonishingly bad coverage last week about methane on Mars, giving people the impression that we’ve got proof-positive of life on the Red Planet. But I think Carol Collins Petersen raises an important point: it’s the headlines that were truly noxious. If you stripped the headlines off of the articles Phil lambastes, they’d range from acceptable to mediocre. At least, that’s my non-scientific analysis. Unfortunately, headline writers are harder to track down than reporters (who don’t write headlines and rarely get to vet them).

Originally published January 19, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

For my third post celebrating the Year of Science, I wanted to write about the secrets of nature that sit right in front of us, in plain view. By coincidence, I happened to be looking at the newest issue of Science and came across a paper about microscopic casks that float by the thousands in our cells, known as vaults. I looked for them in a cell biology textbook. Not there. So I wandered the Tubes and found some papers on line as well an excellent web site about vaults at UCLA. I discovered that scientists haven’t yet figured out what they do.

There are, of course, lots of things about our cells that scientists have yet to figure out. But the blatant obviousness of vaults makes them a stark example of how hard answers are to come by in science. Check out my post.

Continue reading “The Mystery of the Vault” →

Marianne writes, “This tattoo is actually from 4 different sittings at different stages of my scientific career. Specifically, the fish and turtle reflect my first snorkeling experience (the trip was a break from studying for my GRE’s), and then the manatee came along after my SCUBA certification following a trip back to Fl to do so (hence the dive flag flipper), and then I added the seals to reflect my work with marine mammal rehabilitation, and finally the ‘jellies’ (3 local species) which reflect my Master’s degree working with ctenophores. I am currently pursuing my PhD and will add another tattoo, not of my research specifically, but of a dusky dolphin with which I had the opportunity to swim with in New Zealand where I stayed after shipping out to Antarctica for research! Life is good.”

Continue reading “A Career In The Sea [Tattoo]” →

Nicholas writes: “I found your tattoo emporium a while ago and found it so fascinating I wanted one for myself. I wanted to get a UV tattoo for the ability to conceal and the added effect with the black light, of course. I find Euler’s formula to be one of the most magnificent discoveries in mathematics and I wanted to use it in my tattoo. I came up with e^(i pi/2) because its just i. I thought it a great idea then to get an invisible tattoo as the number i.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published January 17, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

Over at Bloggingheads, Chris Mooney declares the War on Science over, I foresee different sorts of conflicts, and together we try to predict the future of science in 2009. 

Originally published January 17, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.