Here’s a nice essay in Natural History about my science tattoo gallery. Expect plenty more new examples in weeks to come. And if you haven’t sent in yours yet, please do!
Originally published August 27, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Get your sniggering over now. I am going to blog about the Penduline Tit.
This post is actually safe for work. The Penduline Tit is not a body part but an ordinary-looking bird. Penduline refers to the pendulous nest that the birds build for their eggs. What makes the bird interesting to me is not its Beavis-and-Butthead caliber name, but how it raises its young. If you think that nature is never destructive, or that natural selection automatically finds beautiful solutions to life’s problems, this bird has a lesson for you.
A couple weeks ago I blogged on a debate over the discovery of soft tissue in a dinosaur. Over at Nature, Rex Dalton has a spicy article about a fresh assault on the findings. I wrote about how the alleged blood vessels and cells in a T. rex fossil might be bacterial biofilms. The scientists had also isolated what they proposed was collagen from the same fossils. Now critics are calling that study “computationally illiterate.” Zing–!
Originally published August 25, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
I just found that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, the 1980 TV series on life and the universe, is now on iTunes. You can get it here, at $1.99 an episode.
I’ve downloaded the first two episodes, which I don’t think I’ve seen since they first aired 28 years ago. I remember watching every episode intently as a 14-year old at the end of the Carter administration. The passage of time has revealed some hokiness around the edges. The music, much of it by Vangelis, sometimes makes me think I’ve walked into a crystal shop. Sagan is fitted in corduroy blazers and what seems to be the precursor of the Members Only jacket.
Today a comment arrived on the Loom that deserves a post of its own. It concerns a death of a reader of this blog.
But first, some background:
In April, a reader named Abigail sent in this tattoo, with the following description:
My first year of college, I wanted to be an English major, and I took Intro Chemistry to fill the science requirement. The brief unit on thermodynamics made me fall totally in love. Entropy made sense to me – scientifically, philosophically. I became a Chemistry major and love every second of it.