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!

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 Los Angeles, where I will be at Comikaze Expo, signing books on Saturday. I’ll post my precise coordinates on Twitter.

Lots more to come…

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!

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

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 the Bragg story, the father-son tag team of physics and the fact that William Lawrence Bragg was only 25 when they got their Nobel Prize.

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

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 director of a children’s community center in L.A. Genetics, neuroscience, and evolution (Darwin gets his own section) form the book’s modern cornerstones and the tattoos range from full back pieces and sleeves to little—often concealable—personal reminders. Encyclopedic in essence, Zimmer’s coffee-table art book presents a wealth of material.

The book is officially published on November 1, but one reader told me she had received hers in the mail already. I’ll post updates here on reviews and talks about Science Ink. And I’m going to finally start posting some images from the backlog of tattoos that people have sent me since I finished work on the book.

[PS--Just one correction: I wrote the historical explanation of the "shoulders of giants" quote, not Rodrigues. That's true for most of the other stuff in the caption-essays.]

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 elegant language through which the Universe reveals its deeply buried and wondrous secrets. It is a great pleasure to see this compendium of truly moving personal statements about the sciences, collected in this superb book.”–Sir Harry Kroto, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry

I’m giving lots of thought about how to spread the word about the book this fall. If you have any suggestions, please get in touch. It’s a bit off the grid, so creativity is called for. Can you think of a venue where you live where there’d be an enthusiastic audience for a talk about the passion of scientists translated into ink? Is there a magazine, blog, or other publication that should know about Science Ink? Let me know!

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.)

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 onto a single question, not 20 questions in 10 different animals, each behaving differently. You essentially build a brain observatory where you try to study one behaviour exhaustively across the brain, and you make the data available to other people.

I spoke to Koch a few months back when I was writing about consciousness for the New York Times. Afterwards, he sent me an email.

Do tattoos of your favorite tools also count, Carl, for your collection? This is mine.

I do have plenty of engineering tattoos in the Science Tattoo Emporium, but I paused at Koch’s. Tools, yes. Brands?

So I asked Koch what this tattoo meant to him.

The original Apple Macintosh, together with the Boeing B-747 Jumbo Jet and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, are the three most beautiful and elegant artifacts of the 20-th century. A perfect marriage of form and function.

Koch’s new job seems like the perfect opportunity to post his picture. Who knows how many other tattooed scientists are taking over the reins of power?

(Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. And keep an eye out for Science Ink: Tattoos of the Scientifically Obsessed this fall.]

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!

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 sympathies to her mother.

The thread fell silent for a year. But then Abigail returned, with a new comment from Sherrie. ”On May 23, 2008, my mother had a double lung transplant,” she wrote.

In 2009, Sherrie’s mother set about finding out whose lungs she carried. She discovered they belonged to Garcia, and she received a letter about her from her mother, Tamara Thomas. “It was a little story of who her daughter was, and through her words, I felt as though I had a little glimpse of her daughter’s spirit,” Sherrie wrote.

“What two amazing women. One taken far too early in life and one to live on alone, but obviously imprinting that spirit in everything she does.When my mom finished reading the letter, of course crying the entire time, she said, I feel so honored to have been chosen to recieve such an amazing child’s gift. We feel truly blessed, and honored, to have been given a second chance. I say we, because I am her caregiver and I went through every step of the transplant process with her. I can promise you, this gift will not be wasted.”

The thread went quiet again for a few months, but came back to life in January 2010, when a friend of Abigail’s at Reed stumbled across the post. “Ava, the name Abigail gave herself at Reed, was truly a pleasure to know,” wrote lovereed. “She was a kind and remarkable girl, and I consider myself so lucky to have had her as a friend. I remember how excited she was about this tattoo, and it has always been one of my favorites. I think it’s beautiful that Ava has given life to others, and the donation of her body to science and medicine embodies the selflessness with which she carried herself every day. I miss her constantly, and I will be carrying her with me when I cross the graduation stage this spring that she, too, was supposed to pass over.”

Ava returned again in April of last year, in the memories of Lucky13. “I never met Ava, although I have met and assisted thousands of students in my nearly twenty year career as a university employee and now college programs manager,” wrote Lucky13. “Ava was affiliated with a program that I now oversee and I had occasionally run across her name on historical lists in my files. All I knew about her initially was that she passed away while traveling to her internship at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. Then today, a rather dissatisfying work day, I again ran across her name on a list. And of an unexplainable reason, I decided I wanted to know more about Abigail Garcia. What I learned in reading brief information on only a couple of sites was that Abigail ‘Ava’ Garcia was nothing short of truly exceptional. In her brief and amazing life she demonstrated the power of intellect when combined with curiousity and passion; something not commonly found in today’s youth. I smiled when I read that she had found an intellectual and emotional home at Reed College. I can only imagine how happy she must have been to be surrounded by others just like her–smart, inquisitive, and engaged in learning. And I could not help but cry at realizing all that was lost when she died. I wonder what she would be planning for her life at this time, the weeks before her graduation from Reed. Whatever it would have been, it would have been extraordinary–as was she. — Thanks to everyone who shared their story.”

And today, almost three years later, Ava paid another visit, with a comment from her mother:

“I now share my daughter’s tattoo. The symbol she designed marks the headstone of her grave. It will be three years this May that she left me, and the pain and loss is still fresh. I am grateful to have connected with some of her organ recipients; I have met the man in whose chest my daughter’s heart beats. I have started writing about what I’ve termed my ‘grief journey’ [link--CZ] in hopes it might help others. There’s not much out there for parents who lose children. Shoot, there’s not even a name for us — not widow, not orphan — why is English so lacking here?”

Words do fail so often. But they suffice for me to say that Ava is always welcome to visit again. We will do our part to wind back entropy’s grind, with memory and life.

[Thanks to Tamara Thomas for the image of Garcia]

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 “HAV” for Hepatitis A. Like everybody else in this part of the world, I’ve had the BCG but will not add a “TB” fruit until a truly effective tuberculosis vaccine is invented.

As I announced last month, I’m turning the Science Tattoo Emporium into a book called Science Ink. 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.

In just a few weeks, I’ve been inundated with lots of book-ready images–not just bigger versions of the ones I’ve put on the blog, but many new ones as well. I originally set a deadline of October 1 (tomorrow), so that I and my designers could put the book together in time for its fall 2011 publication date. A day before the deadline, we’ve got many more images than we set as our target number, which is gratifying. But we keep getting last-minute emails from people like Shi-Hsia Hwa with more ink to offer. Who are we to turn our noses to this stuff?

So here’s the deal: I’m extending the deadline to October 15. Contact me for submission details. And if anyone has had any trouble uploading their tattoo pictures, get in touch.

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.