Sarah writes:
“My latest tattoo is a black-line representation of the Uffington White Horse in England. It’s a huge earthwork carved into the countryside about three thousand years ago. I’m not really sure what compelled me to get it, since I’m a grad student in English and not archaeology or anthropology. But it’s such a beautiful, simple design, and it represents a real feat of Bronze Age ingenuity.”
Yesterday is the birthday of the man who froze the gallop and thawed it out again.
From, of course, Wikipedia.
Originally published April 10, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
A trilobite from Lea, a graduate student in ecology.
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published April 9, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Luzius writes:
“I’m a PhD student in Historical Linguistics in Zürich, and I’ve got a glottal stop tattoo on the pinkie of my left hand. It is one of the letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet and it designates a specific consonant occuring in many languages of the world. To articulate a glottal stop, you need to stop the airflow by pressing your vocal cords together, build up pressure from the lungs, and then release the vocal cords with an audible burst. Many dialects of English have a glottal stop instead of /t/ in words like /cat/ or /butter/. It is common in German, too, where you can hear it in front in front of words starting with a vowel, like /Anna/ or /Eis/.
A new map of some of the connections neurons make in the frontal cortex of a monkey’s brain. From PLOS Computational Biology. Bigger image here.
Originally published April 4, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
