Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 87
July 14, 2010
From the Vault: An Inordinate Fondness for Beetle Horns
[An old post I'm fond of]
[image error]
It's strange enough that beetles grow horns. But it's especially strange that beetles grow so many kinds of horns. This picture, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Evolution, shows a tiny sampling of this diversity. The species shown here all belong to the genus Onthophagus, a group of dung beetles. The colors in this picture, which are false, show which parts of the beetle body the horns grow from. Blue horns grow from the back of the head, red f...
The Magic Formula [Science Tattoo]
Billy Hudson, a mathematician, writes, "I was in a introductory Number Theory class when Professor David Ferguson told me that e^(ipi) + 1 = 0. Of course, Euler's equation had the same affect on me as it has on many undergraduate mathematicians, i.e. I was hooked. I had the equation tattooed on my arm in May of 1998, thinking that if nothing else it would be unique. I've still yet to meet anyone else with the tattoo, but as your site shows, there are others (although I still think I may have ...
July 13, 2010
From the Vault: My Darwinian Daughters
[An old post I'm fond of]
My wife and I have two lovely daughters: Charlotte is two and a half, and Veronica is seven weeks. And we are tired. We think of ourselves as being on the losing end of a tag-team wrestling match–particularly at about seven in the morning, after Veronica has gone through a few hours of pre-dawn nursing, squirming, groaning, crying, spewing, and nursing. Just when she has faded off into angelic sleep, Charlotte wakes up from a long restful night and wants to eat...
The Tattoo That Wasn't There
Matt writes, "I took an alternate path to understanding the world from most of your readers. I switched from psychology to history in order to better research what really happened as opposed to what kids are taught in school. A concept that stuck with me and in fact is a critical reference point for me in every day life is our tendency to seek patterns and to see things that aren't there. As a tribute to the fallibility of our complex brains my first tattoo is a visualization of the
July 12, 2010
From the Vault: Hamilton's Fall
[An old post I'm fond of]
Just before the winter solstice brings autumn to an end, here's a chance to blog about the great evolutionary biologist–and student of fall foliage–William Hamilton. Hamilton, who died in 2000, has never reached the household-name status of other evolutionary biologists such as E.O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould. But he deserves a place of privilege, for all his profoundly influential ideas. He found an explanation for altruistic behavior in many...
Jurassic Mascot [Science Ink]
Susan, a graduate student, writes,
I got my tattoo in 2008 after raising enough money by carrying around a jar marked "tattoo fund" as I bar hopped for my 21st birthday. The tattoo is of a Permian cephalopod from the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas, Cooperoceras texanum.
I have loved paleontology for as long as I can remember. When I was looking at colleges, I came across a program called "Earth, Life, and Time" at the University of Maryland. It was a 2 year program as a part of an honors living...
July 9, 2010
The Blog Days of Summer
Between scrambling to finish some big projects and avoiding summer brain-fry, I haven't been doing much science blogging recently. And now I'll be taking a few days away from blogging altogether. It's not a blackout at the Loom, though; just a brown-out. I'm going to schedule some old posts I'm fond of, as well as a backlog of science tattoos. Later this month I'll be rested, refreshed, and ready to blog anew.
July 8, 2010
Pepsi, We Hardly Knew Ye!
A quick update to my post from yesterday about Scienceblogs. The dreaded Pepsi blog is gone. Details from PZ Myers and Paul Raeburn.
July 7, 2010
Oh, Pepsi, What Hast Thou Wrought?
As I continue to bake today, yearning for just a few minutes in Senator Inhofe's igloo, I've been keeping tabs on a saddening train wreck over at my old haunt, Scienceblogs. Before I brought the Loom to Discover, I blogged at Scienceblogs, which was hosted by the folks behind the now-defunct (?) Seed Magazine. There was a lot I enjoyed about that time, and I still keep tabs on a number of excellent bloggers still at Scienceblogs. Except that, as of today, a lot of them are no longer there.
Her...
Facebook Is Not A Brain, And Other Failed Metaphors
It sounds cool to say maybe the Internet has turned us all into one giant superorganism, as Robert Wright does today in the Opinionator blog at the New York Times. But before we bandy about coold-sounding words, it's necessary to think hard about what they mean–particularly, what they mean to the biologists who first developed them as concepts.
The word superorganism can describe an ant colony or any other society of animals in which the individuals function like cells in a body. They come in ...
