The Loom » Science Tattoo Emporium

Thursday, February 16: Science and social media panel in New York

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:57:18 +0000

Next week is Social Media Week, during which time the American Museum of Natural History is hosting an exploration of science and social media. It will take place on Thursday, 2/16, at 6 pm, and after the official panel discussion there will be a beer and wine reception in the Museum’s Hall of Minerals and Gems.

The panelists for the evening include–

Ben Lillie, the physicist turned spoken-word impresario who has founded the delightful Story Collider

Matt Danzico, a BBC journalist who conducted a 365-day blog experiment called “The Time Hack” looking at how we perceive time

Ruth Cohen, Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning at the American Museum of Natural History, who will talk about how the museum uses apps to help kids learn about urban biodiversity

–and me. I’ll talk about how social media (primarily the Loom) turned me into a curator of science tattoos and then an author of a decidedly unusual coffee table book.

The discussion will be moderated by Jennifer Kingson, an editor in the Science Department at The New York Times.

The event is free, but you need to register on the event page.

Archaeopteryx: The Embargoed Tattoo

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:00:03 +0000

A fair number of scientists like to get a tattoo to celebrate their research. Ryan Carney, a biologist at Brown University has taken the practice one step further. He’s gotten a tattoo that shows the key finding of a paper he and his colleagues have just published today. They studied a fossil feather from Archaeopteryx, the iconic bird (or almost-bird). They conclude it looked just like this tattoo.

Carney collaborated on the research with a team of scientists who have developed a method to reconstruct colors from fossils. One source of colors in animals is a cellular structure called a melanosome. Depending on the size, shape, and spacing of melanosomes, they can produce a range of hues. It turns out that melanosomes are incredibly rugged, sometimes enduring for millions of years.

As I wrote in the New York Times in 2009, the scientists first found melanosomes in the ink sac of a fossil squid and then went on to look at a 47-million-year-old bird feather. Then they went on to look at the feathers and feather-like structures of dinosaurs, reconstructing some of the colors of their plumage. The color pattern, ...

Science Ink in New York: This Tuesday

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:52:54 +0000

This Tuesday I’ll be giving a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences about Science Ink–complete with live tattooed scientists!

Here are some of the details…

When: Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM. (A reception will follow.)
Where: The New York Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street, 40th floor
New York, NY 10007-2157
212.298.8600

Get $10 dollars off full-price tickets by using the promo code ZIMMER. Register here: http://www.nyas.org/scienceink

See you there!

Science Ink on this week’s Science Friday

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:36:17 +0000

I’ll be on National Public Radio’s Science Friday this week to talk about Science Ink. Host Ira Flatow and I will be chatting during the 3 pm EST hour. In the meantime, the folks at Science Friday have set up a slide show preview.

The Wall Street Journal ogles tattoos, and more #scienceink news

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:33:04 +0000

1. Good morning. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal features Science Ink in their Visualizer Column. I stopped by their offices on Friday and recorded an interview with WSJ editor Gary Rosen, which I’ve embedded below.

2. In other news…Amazon has Science Ink back in stock, and they’re offering it at half price.

3. The Huffington Post Science section featured Science Ink, which surely must bode well for its future.

4. I’ll be on the radio this week talking about the book–details to come!

5. Finally, let me just remind New Yorkers that I’ll be speaking at the New York Academy of Sciences about Science Ink on Tuesday, January 24, at 7 pm.

Here are some of the details…

Get $10 dollars off admission by using the promo code ZIMMER. Register here:http://www.nyas.org/scienceink

January 24: Science Ink comes to the New York Academy of Sciences

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:38:04 +0000

Greetings, Gothamites! If you’re free Tuesday, January 24, please join me for a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences. I’ll be delivering an anthropological lecture about an intriguing sub-culture that expresses itself with body inscriptions. I speak, of course, of scientists with tattoos.

At my last talk, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the evening was enhanced with the presence of actual, flesh-and-blood scientists with tattoos, some of whom appear in the pages of Science Ink. If you are a member of this inky, geeky clan and are planning on coming to the New York talk, please let me know so that I can try to work you into the presentation.

Here are some of the details…

Get $10 dollars off full-price tickets by using the promo code ZIMMER. Register here: http://www.nyas.org/scienceink

The Science Ink of Moby Dick

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:51:47 +0000

I’ve been doing some research on the long cultural history of tattoos in preparation for my talk about Science Ink at Harvard on Tuesday. I’m a hard-core Moby Dick fan (this blog’s name comes from there), so it was a delight to stumble across a passage on tattoos, which I had forgotten.

Queequeg, readers may recall, was covered with tattoos. Here’s how Ishmael describes them:

This tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.

[Image: Rockwell Kent, Plattsburgh State Art Museum]

#scienceink round-up: Der Spiegel, The Toronto Star, and more

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 04:33:39 +0000

It’s been a busy week for Science Ink!

1. Science Ink was on TV. The Daily Planet, a Canadian science news show on the Discovery Channel, interviewed me about my favorite tattoos.

2.The Irish Times put Science Ink on top of its list of science books for holiday gifts. (As did MSNBC and io9.)

3. Der Spiegel takes a look.

4. The Toronto Star has a whole package on Science Ink in Saturday’s issue: A Q&A with yours truly, an article by Megan Ogilvie about Toronto-area scientists with tattoos, and a slide show of their tattoos. (I was amazed that there were lots of tattoos I had never seen before!)

5. Just a reminder to folks in Boston: I will be giving a lecture at the Harvard Museum of Natural History on Tuesday, 12/13 at 6 pm. The lecture is free and open to the public. (The parking is free too!) Details are here.

[This tattoo of cyanide is from David Lighthart.]

The Observer gets inked (+ more #scienceink news)

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:12:37 +0000

1. Science Ink excerpt: The Observer (The Guardian’s sister Sunday magazine) has put together a lovely excerpt from Science Ink. Along with a selection of images, they’ve adapted part of the introductory essay I wrote for the book. Here’s a snippet:

…Some people have watched this growing obsession of mine and scoffed. They see tattoos as nothing but mistakes of youth, fated to sag, or to be scorched off with a laser beam.

But tattoos are etched deep in our species. In 1991, two hikers climbing the Austrian Alps discovered the freeze-dried body of a 5,300-year-old hunter, who came to be known as Ötzi. His skin was exquisitely preserved, including a series of hatch-marks on his back and a cross pattern on his knee. A team of Austrian researchers determined that the tattoos had been made with ashes from a fireplace, which someone had sprinkled into small incisions in Ötzi’s skin.

Tattoos are preserved on other mummies from ancient civilisations, from the Scythians of central Asia to the Chiribaya of Peru. If, through some miracle of preservation, archaeologists find older human skin, I ...

The Bipedal Atlas #scienceink

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 23:49:44 +0000

Zsuzsa Megyery writes,

I’m a student at MIT in the Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Science Department hoping to solve the glacially-coupled climate problem of global warming by developing efficient carbon sequestration technology. In honor of our beautiful mother Earth, and as a constant reminder of the places I can go under my own human power, I had the world map, minus Antarctica, tattooed on the tops of my feet in a Mercator projection.

It is deeply personal to me–I am Hungarian, with the European continent on one foot–but grew up in the US–so the Western half is on the other side. I have a minimal carbon footprint on our mother Earth, cycling as much as possible for transportation and even hoping to circum-paddle Antarctica some day.

Click here to order a copy of Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.

Click here to view the Science Tattoo Emporium.

#scienceink update: The New York Times does a slide show, and New Scientist approves

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:05:37 +0000

Two pieces of Science Ink related news:

1. The New York Times put together a slide show from the book (including several tattoos that I haven’t published on the blog). Check it out.

2. New Scientist offered this kind review (sub’n required):

“When Carl Zimmer asked on his blog whether tattoos were common among scientists, he unwittingly became the curator of a set of incredible images, and of intimate stories that reveal a love affair with science. We are familiar with the idea that people tattoo themselves with a name or symbol representing the great love in their life. Those who love science are no different. Zimmer was inundated with responses.

“Many are literal representations of a scientist’s obsession with their profession:a tree of life covering a zoology graduate’s back, or a cross section through a mountain chain for a geology student. Others tell more personal stories, such as the neuroscientist with a tattoo of the type of nerve cell that is damaged in Lou Gehrig’s disease, which killed her father. This book gathers up the marvels of science that have touched people so deeply they wanted to embody them. Zimmer’s explanations of these concepts turns what could have been ...

The Toughest Bear in the Universe #scienceink

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:30:06 +0000

Spencer Debenport, a plant pathologist at Ohio State University, sports a tattoo of a tardigrade, a microscopic animal known as the water bear. “I have always loved microscopic critters, and there is none other as intriguing as the tardigrade,” he writes. ”The fact that they are so hardy, yet still that odd mixture of ugly/cute drew me to them and the more I read up on them, the more I wanted one permanently on me. I am also a mycologist, so whenever I look at lichens I get to see loads of these little guys roaming around.”

In Science Ink, I included another tattoo of a tardigrade, and describe it this way:

Tardigrades make the world their hiding place. They live invisibly in the ground, in the muck of ponds and deep-sea sediments, in dunes, in moss, in stone walls, on the tops of mountains, and deep inside glaciers. They go unnoticed thanks to their miniature dimensions: the biggest tardigrades don’t get bigger than a poppy seed. When the naturalist Johann August Ephraim Goeze discovered tardigrades in 1773, he dubbed them kleiner Wasserbär, meaning little water bear. Their stocky bodies and ...

Radio: Friday 10 am PST (1 pm EST) on KQED

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:46:10 +0000

I’m in San Francisco for the Bay Area Science Festival. On Friday at 10 am PST, I’ll be appearing on Forum, a morning show on KQED. Listen here live!

Calling the #scienceink tribe in San Francisco and Los Angeles! I’m headed your way this week.

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:22:38 +0000

Today Science Ink is published! Amazon has already run out of copies to sell, but not to worry–the books are spitting out of printers as I blog this. Order your copy, and it will get to you soon. If you’re on the fence, check out this review from Nature (yes, that Nature, the venerable scientific journal): “Beautiful…packed with fascinating stories.” (It’s behind a paywall, alas…)

On Thursday, I’ll be heading off for the first of a bunch of events for the book. As part of the Bay Area Science Festival, I’ll be in San Francisco on Friday.

The first tattoo-themed stop will be Black & Blue Tattoo, on Friday from 7:15 to 8:15 pm. I’ll be showing images from the book and telling some of the stories behind them. If you’re a tattooed Bay Area scientist, please come and share your ink!

The second stop will be Booksmith, at 8:30 pm. It’s part of their Bookswap series.

(I’ll also be at a non-tattoo event as part the festival: Gut Check: The Hidden World of Microbes, on Friday at 12:30 at UC San Francisco. Details here.)

Then it’s on to ...

#scienceink on Studio 360 this weekend

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:34:34 +0000

We’re getting close to the publication of Science Ink (official date, November 1), and some very fun things are approaching. The wonderful National Public Radio show Studio 360, hosted by Kurt Anderson, decided to talk to some of the scientists featured in the book–about their science, about their tattoos, and about the nature of openness. It will be on their next episode, which starts airing around the country this weekend. (Here’s the segment page on their web site.)

And you can listen to it right here–

//

More announcements to come!

An Infective Arm #scienceink

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:32:43 +0000

Nuria Gonzalez-Montalban, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, writes:

My name is Núria and I am a biologist working with prions. Since the structure of prions has not been described yet (at least completely), I would not want to tattoo a possibly-wrong prion. Instead, I chose a T4 virus since part of my undergrad and PhD were related to E.coli and T4 bacteriophages.

Given that bacteriophages are the most common living thing on Earth, it’s good that at least one person on Earth has it on his arm.

Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed will be published on November 1, 2011. (“Breathtaking”–Publisher’s Weekly)

Click here to view the Science Tattoo Emporium

Crystallography in High Heels #scienceink

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:52:08 +0000

Josephine Schuppang of Technical University in Berlin writes,

I was pointed to your blog when I talked to a friend about my newest tattoo. He told me that you are collecting scientific tattoos. I didn’t even know there were other people who did that sort of thing. You bet my tattoo artist looked strangely at me for my request.

So attached find a picture of my tattoo of Bragg’s Law. It is along the side of my left foot and shows nicely in my favorite pair of heels.

I studied Physics, and although I wanted to go in to Astronomy I got lost a bit and landed in Crystallography, which has a long history here in Berlin. Last year I wrote my thesis on the transmission electron microscopy of nitride semiconductors. After my defense I wanted to get a tattoo to remember this occasion. But all the formulas I did use were too long and complex to use, and all the images I took wouldn’t have worked.

So I decided on a fundamental formula, Bragg’s Law. It is important for electron diffraction, so that fits. And I have always liked ...

Starred review for #ScienceInk in Publisher’s Weekly: “Breathtaking”

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:36:41 +0000

I appreciated this start to the week: a starred review of Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed in Publisher’s Weekly:

Noting a colleague’s DNA-inspired tattoo at a pool party, science writer Zimmer (A Planet of Viruses) wondered how widespread the phenomenon of the inked scientist was. He solicited pictures for his blog, “The Loom,” and, inundated with photos and stories from scientists and laypeople alike, quickly became a curator of science-inspired body art. Mary Roach’s foreword lays out why, given the passion with which so many approach their fields, it should be no surprise to encounter this worldwide tribe whose obsessed love for every far-flung corner of science’s domain was marked permanently on their bodies. Divided into 13 sections, the book is filled with breathtaking color photos accompanied by grounding texts: Portuguese geneticist Dônovan Fereira Rodrigues, who got Isaac Newton’s “shoulders of giants” quote inked on his back, tells the story behind the phrase; August Kekule’s “discovery” of benzene’s structure inspired Virginia pharmacology PhD. Jeffrey Ikeda; a tattoo of Nikola Tesla’s visions of a wireless future lies on the arm of Abraham Orozco, the science ...

Science Ink: Spreading the Word

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 05:22:38 +0000

Here’s the final version of the cover of Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed. It now includes Mary Roach, who kindly provided a lovely foreword for the book.

Science Ink will be hitting book stores on November 1. Here are a couple blurbs…

“How apt: the most enduring ideas in science translated into that most enduring personal art—the tattoo. Science Ink marries mind and body, and Zimmer reveals the beauty that motivates so many scientists.”–Sam Kean, author of The Disappearing Spoon

“After spending long hours at the computer, in the lab or field, science has a way of getting under your skin. Science Ink reveals the great ideas and deep passion for science revealed in some of the most creative body art on the planet today. This is a book to revel on the best ideas and discoveries in science and of the passion scientists have for their life’s work.”–Neil Shubin, University of Chicago, author of Your Inner Fish

“Here is to be found the evidence that scores of intelligent and intellectually perceptive young people recognise that equations, symbols and structures are the key constituents of the ...

Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour video is up. Jackalopes, zombie ants, evolution’s odometer, and more!

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 19:51:59 +0000

Brian Malow and I talked yesterday about some of my favorite things on the latest episode of Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour–including the evolution odometer. You can watch it on Youtube, or you can head over to Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour site to download the video or audio. (The Skype goes berserk briefly, but we get back on track.)

Tattooed scientists are taking over!

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 21:36:14 +0000

Christof Koch is one of the world’s leading experts on consciousness. A longtime professor at Caltech, he’s just become the chief scientific officer at the Allen Brain Institute, an innovative research center that was funded with $100 million from Microsoft’s Paul Allen. The institute has spent the past eight years building remarkably detailed, three-dimensional atlases of mouse brains. Now, as Koch explains to Nature, he will use those atlases to launch an ambitious new project:

The idea is to focus on one or two behaviours — how we see, for instance, or smell, or remember — and ask how the relevant information is encoded, represented and transformed to give rise to behaviour.

The challenge is a bit like creating the Thirty Meter Telescope, which is going to be built on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in the next decade, at a cost of roughly $1 billion. There you have a couple of hundred people who are all working toward a common goal.

Neuroscience hasn’t had something like that, but the time is right to bring all these resources to bear ...

Science Ink: Here’s the cover!

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:52:49 +0000

There’s now a page in Sterling’s fall catalog for my book of science tattoos. Here’s the cover. You won’t be able to appreciate its full die-cut splendor, however, till you hold it in your hands when it comes out in October 2011. More details to come!

Requiem, revisited

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 04:48:37 +0000

For nearly three years, the story of Abigail Garcia has woven its way through this blog.

Back in April 2008, I got an email from Garcia, at the time an 18-year-old student at Reed College. I had started gathering science tattoos, and she had one she wanted to share.

“My first year of college, I wanted to be an English major,” she wrote, “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. I got the tattoo to mark my rite of passage–Entropy going both ways, with its symble delta-S in the middle, all supported in the roots of Yggdrasil, the world-tree of Norse mythology (harking back to my English-lit days).”

Three months later, her mother left a note in the comment thread for the tattoo. Garcia had died in a car crash. The thread became a condolence book, for people who had never met Garcia but who felt a link strong enough to want to offer their ...

The Vaccine Tree (Plus An Extended Deadline For The Science Ink Book) [Science Tattoo]

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:38:51 +0000

Shi-Hsia Hwa writes,

I’m a virologist in a biotech company in Singapore. Here’s my story: I’ve been interested in infectious diseases since I was a kid, because my father almost died of TB when he was an infant. I must have been the only kid who looked forward to mass vaccination days in school. For a field trip to the Philippines after my bachelor’s and my first job shortly thereafter, I had to be immunized against a lot of other things that the average person doesn’t.

The choice of motif was inspired by a verse from the Biblical book of Revelation (a k a Apocalypse): “On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” The “tree of life” motif in Western folk art is a tree bearing various different fruits on its branches.

I was stupid and didn’t check the stencil after the tattooist smudged one part, which is why there are two “PV”s; one should have been ...

In Praise of Mistakes [Science tattoo]

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 13:04:38 +0000

Andrew, a medical student, writes,

“I recently got a tattoo of Penicillin G on my arm. As someone who stumbled into medical school as a non-traditional student after a few career missteps, I appreciate a good mistake. There are few mistakes that were as amazing and important to medicine as the ‘discovery’ of Penicillin. Had Alexander Fleming remembered to close his laboratory’s window, who knows where we would be in the fight against infectious disease?”

In case you missed my announcement over the summer, the Science Tattoo Emporium is going to become a book. Tentatively entitled Science Ink, it will be published next fall by Sterling. The images will be accompanied by some of my own reflections on the tattoos, in which I will unpack the inside jokes and strange histories of the science behind the pictures.

The ultimate purpose of the book, like the Emporium, will be to illustrate the passion that science can inspire. To that end, I also plan to donate a portion of the proceeds from the book to DonorsChoose, a great organization that funds science projects in the classroom.

To those who ...