Gallery of science tattoos

By at 9:04 am Thursday, Jan 7

darwinsfinchestat.jpg

Witty, smart and beautiful body art. Readers of Carl Zimmer's blog, The Loom, sent in pictures of and stories about their science-themed tattoos. Some are just amazing bits of work, including this one that looks like a standard butterfly on first glance, but is actually the four finch species that helped Charles Darwin formulate his early ideas on evolution. The tattoo's owner writes ...

I am a developmental biologist by training. Actually, my Ph.D. thesis does not really have an evolutionary focus because I study joint regeneration in embryonic chick limb. However, I have been an evolution enthusiast and also an activist for educating public about the theory of evolution for a long time. I could not imagine a better tattoo: Darwin's finches arranged to look like a butterfly...I got it in 2009-Darwin's 200th anniversary and On The Origin of Species' 150th anniversary. I spent last few years reading and writing a lot on evolution, as well as playing the "editor-in-chief" for translating UC Berkeley's Understanding Evolution website into Turkish (Evrimi Anlamak - a completely volunteer work by our group called Hard-workers for Evolution). All in all, I am a biologist and "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution"... So, I celebrate it with four finches on my shoulder!

The Loom: Science Tattoo Emporium

(Thanks to Hannah Lucy King!)

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Maggie Koerth-Baker

I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.

Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.

Upcoming Appearances
• February 20 at British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association — Vancouver. 7:00 pm
• February 29 at University of Minnesota: Frontiers in the Environment seminar
• March 1 at Huge Theater, Minneapolis: The Theater of Public Policy
• March 12 at University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign
• March 27 at Penn State Institutes on Energy and the Environment
• March 29-31 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
• April 2 at MIT: The New GeekSpeak: Science Journalists' New Toolbox, with Eli Kintisch and John Bohannon — Maseeh Hall, 4:00 pm
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins — 4:00 pm
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum

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