Anthropology.net

Michael Callahan of Ambient Corp. in Champaign, Ill. and the University of Illinois has recently introduced The Audeo, a thought-to-speech interfacing device which acquires and converts neurological signals into vocalizations. The device allows users to communicate with a computer much in the way voice recognition software does. However, instead of encrypting wave patterns detected in recorded utterances, The Audeo acquires and discerns individual words from neurological signals produced by the intent to vocalize.

The Audeo is being developed to create a human-computer interface for communication without the need of physical motor control or speech production. Using signal processing, unpronounced speech representing the thought of the mind can be translated from intercepted neurological signals. By interfacing near the source of vocal production, the Audeo has the potential to restore communication to people who are unable to speak. The proposed solution is a featherweight wireless device resting over the vocal cords capable of transmitting neurological information from the brain. Using data analysis, this information can be processed into synthesized speech or a menu selection capable of conveying the basic necessities of human life.

Callahan suggests possible applications of the technology, including wheelchair control for the disabled and thought-to-speech conversion for patients with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) who lose the ability to speak over time. Demonstrations of the device can be found in the media section of The Audeo’s website as well as at the Texas Instruments Developer’s Conference Keynote. Although the prospect of retaining voices for ALS patients sounds promising, there may be a down side. If such technology were cheap and efficient, would this bear implications on sign language? As Standard American English (and other prestige dialects) continues to be commodified on 24-hour global news networks, endangering small languages, could the prospect of a new voice place signed languages in danger?

Remember in 2005-06 when there was a whole lot of buzz about the quadrupedal siblings in Turkey? There first was this paper, “Cerebellar hypoplasia and quadrupedal locomotion in humans as a recessive trait mapping to chromosome 17p,” and then there was this paper, “A new syndrome with quadrupedal gait, primitive speech, and severe mental retardation as a live model for human evolution,” which made a big splash… enough of a splash that a NOVA special was made.

John Hawks criticized this all, especially on the merit if this ‘behavior’ is due to genetic mutations, but he also had beef with how the press was handling the implications of these people. I too didn’t like how everyone was calling these modern humans with a syndrome as primitive cavemen, but what can you do?

Of course, as physical anthropologists, we can’t ignore these quadrupeds because they walk on all fours, and some of our closest evolutionary cousins (chimpanzees and gorillas) also walk on all fours. But you can’t say these people reverted back to a more ancestral primate locomotion technique. Chimps and gorillas walk on their knuckles, whereas these people walk plantigrade. Also, they look more strained walking on fours than do our more furry primate brethren, and that makes sense because limb proportions and overall body size of these people still are bipedal in pattern.

Well, it has been pretty quiet since then. We haven’t heard much from the two families in Turkey who walk on all fours, have speech deficiencies, and exhibit hypoplasia of the brain. I think that will all change with this new awesome PNAS paper that just came out recently. The paper, “Mutations in the very low-density lipoprotein receptor VLDLR cause cerebellar hypoplasia and quadrupedal locomotion in humans,” identifies two mutations in the VLDLR gene from members of the family who have this syndrome.

The last author of this new paper, Uner Tan, was actually the guy who published that 2006 paper which got Hawks to say Tan is incorrect in thinking that the language and locomotion disabilities of these quadrupeds in Turkey are genetically linked. Hawks said,

“Human bipedality and human cognition are both highly complex traits involving anatomical, developmental, and behavioral specializations. Each of them involved hundreds, and for cognition I would say thousands, of different genetic changes. There was no small set of macromutations that caused these traits to arise…

….I think it’s really unlikely that a gene that causes cerebellar ataxia was a critical bipedality gene. It may be necessary to walking normally, but it probably (indeed, evidently from the nature of the disorder) is very important to a lot of other things as well. A gene that breaks early brain development is no more likely than other genes to have a specific function role in the development or practice of bipedalism in humans…

…The main point is this: the fact that a gene breaks something doesn’t mean that it was the key gene necessary to create something. Suppose that you want to figure out how a car works. So you look at cars that aren’t working right, and you see what is broken. Now, you will notice that cars run sort of poorly with flat tires, they run with depleted batteries but won’t start, they will run for a bit without motor oil, but then seize up, and so on.

Cerebellar ataxia breaks a whole lot of things. It’s like breaking the crankshaft — the engine might run, but it is going to make a whole lot of noise, and the car isn’t going to move. We may conclude that the crankshaft is necessary for the wheels to move. But does that mean that the crankshaft is the key component of the wheel? Clearly not.

The analogy between cars and organismal development is useful because both systems depend on hierarchical functions. Early things must all work right for later things to develop. When an upstream gene (or part) breaks, it doesn’t mean that downstream things affected by the broken gene were caused by the broken gene.”

Now it seems like Tan et al. have found a gene that affects the development of bipedality and language, as well as a lot of other things. Actually the authors used genome-wide analytic tools to genetically map regions on three different chromosomes that are shared and are responsible for the condition seen in the two different families. Most the most interesting genetic similarity is a homozygoitic 1.3 megabase region of chromosome 9. Within this region, lies the gene VLDLR.

VLDLR is a gene that encodes a low density lipoprotein receptor. Its widely found in heart, skeletal muscle, and adipose tissue and thought to function in fatty acid metabolism, bringing in different molecules like enzymes and transporters into the cell. VLDLR has been actually identified as a critical component of the reelin signaling pathway, a cascade of events that develop the central nervous system. So it is not exclusively expressed in heart, muscle, and fat. Any deleterious mutation in VLDLR would ultimately effect how the nervous system is made and how it functions. Since locomotion and language are controlled by the central nervous system, you can begin to see how important VLDLR is. Aside from neural development, the authors hypothesize that VLDLR functions in positioning cells in the brain, and maturing the cerebellum so that bipedalism can function.

The authors decided to hone in on VLDLR. They made a pedigree chart that shows the affected individuals, and sequenced the VLDLR gene from affected individuals in both families. They were able to identify two mutant alleles, specific to each family, that deviated with the wild type VLDLR gene. Affected individuals in the first family carried a swap of a cytosine to a thymine in position 769 of the gene. This is a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) that caused a nonsense mutation, resulting in a premature stop codon. The second family actually had a deletion of a thymine in position 2339. This is also a single nucleotide SNP. Had this deletion been in 3 bases, carriers of this allele may have had a functioning VLDLR receptor, but since it involved a single base, a frame shift occurred and basically messed up everything downstream. I’ve taken out the chormatogram from the sequencing to show you what the mutations look like:

The authors confirmed the extent of these mutations using qPCR. They were able to show how the early stop and frameshift mutations are both in the part of resultant protein that binds reelin, and ultimately are not able to begin the reelin signal transduction.

This paper is really elegant! It is very simple and powerful. They were able to correlate a phenotype to a mutation in a important gene that affects how the nervous system is developed, and how it functions. Since these people affected by Unertan syndrome have serious neurological disorders, it is a pretty clear genotype-phenotype association. I feel Tan and crew are vindicated from Hawks criticisms.

Ozcelik, T., Akarsu, N., Uz, E., Caglayan, S., Gulsuner, S., Onat, O.E., Tan, M., Tan, U. (2008). Mutations in the very low-density lipoprotein receptor VLDLR cause cerebellar hypoplasia and quadrupedal locomotion in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0710010105

TAN, U. (2006). A NEW SYNDROME WITH QUADRUPEDAL GAIT, PRIMITIVE SPEECH, AND SEVERE MENTAL RETARDATION AS A LIVE MODEL FOR HUMAN EVOLUTION. International Journal of Neuroscience, 116(3), 361-369. DOI: 10.1080/00207450500455330

Turkmen, S. (2005). Cerebellar hypoplasia and quadrupedal locomotion in humans as a recessive trait mapping to chromosome 17p. Journal of Medical Genetics, 43(5), 461-464. DOI: 10.1136/jmg.2005.040030

According to this open access PLoS One paper, 95% of Native Americans share their heritage to six women. I don’t have much time to review this paper because I have to take a final exam in 30 minutes, but here’s the title and link to the paper, “The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups: Implications for Evolutionary and Disease Studies.” The title is pretty self explanatory, a cladistic analysis of Native American mtDNA haplogroups was undertaken. The authors were able to trace 6 distinct branches of the phylogenetic tree that arose from different women. Of course that doesn’t mean that only six women made it across Beringia, but a significant portion of Native Americans can trace their ancestry to six distinct mothers.

To compensate for a rather lackluster post, the abstract may give you a bit more information,

“Only a limited number of complete mitochondrial genome sequences belonging to Native American haplogroups were available until recently, which left America as the continent with the least amount of information about sequence variation of entire mitochondrial DNAs. In this study, a comprehensive overview of all available complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomes of the four pan-American haplogroups A2, B2, C1, and D1 is provided by revising the information scattered throughout GenBank and the literature, and adding 14 novel mtDNA sequences. The phylogenies of haplogroups A2, B2, C1, and D1 reveal a large number of sub-haplogroups but suggest that the ancestral Beringian population(s) contributed only six (successful) founder haplotypes to these haplogroups. The derived clades are overall starlike with coalescence times ranging from 18,000 to 21,000 years (with one exception) using the conventional calibration. The average of about 19,000 years somewhat contrasts with the corresponding lower age of about 13,500 years that was recently proposed by employing a different calibration and estimation approach. Our estimate indicates a human entry and spread of the pan-American haplogroups into the Americas right after the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum and comfortably agrees with the undisputed ages of the earliest Paleoindians in South America. In addition, the phylogenetic approach also indicates that the pathogenic status proposed for various mtDNA mutations, which actually define branches of Native American haplogroups, was based on insufficient grounds.”

Achilli, A., Perego, U.A., Bravi, C.M., Coble, M.D., Kong, Q., Woodward, S.R., Salas, A., Torroni, A., Bandelt, H., Macaulay, V. (2008). The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups: Implications for Evolutionary and Disease Studies. PLoS ONE, 3(3), e1764. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001764

The 36th edition of the Four Stone Hearth anthropology blog carnival is being hosted over at Afarensis, and as ever we are treated to a good and eclectic mix of what’s been catching the eyes of various anthro-bloggers this past week or two.

Next time round we’ll be nipping over to Hot Cup of Joe, who will be serving up the March 26th edition.

I accidentally forgot to leave out some very critical drama surrounding the Palau findings that I just reported on. Next Monday, March 17th 2008, the National Geographic Channel will be running a documentary titled, “Mystery Skulls of Palau.” The National Geographic Channel is funded by the National Geographic Society, the very group that Lee Berger sought out to fund the excavation of the Palau fossils after he discovered them.

Rex Dalton, of Nature News, has looked into this issue a bit more. Dalton, if you don’t know, has been reporting for Nature News on paleontology, anthropology and the like for almost ten years. He’s also specialized in figuring out scientific misconduct. In his report on the Palau findings, “Pacific ‘dwarf’ bones cause controversy,” Dalton’s covers most of the basics that is running in the press but he’s also got some juicy bits about how Berger’s irked some government officials in Palau.

“The new claim was first disclosed in a commercial movie produced by the National Geographic Society, which partially funded Berger’s work. Although the movie is not scheduled for broadcast in the United States until 17 March, it was shown in Asia on 1 March, before the journal publication, drawing criticism.

In Palau, some officials and traditional leaders are concerned that sacred burial sites were exploited for movie-making rather than scientific purposes. Adalbert Eledui, the state resource manager who oversees the region, describes the movie as “unscientific” and says he should have had notice before it was broadcast to protect the sites from an expected influx of visitors. Now, he says, resource managers may need to build cages to restrict access to the caves….

…Most of the island’s chiefs had never visited the caves before last week, because Palauans typically avoid burial sites. Palau’s paramount chief Yutaka Gibbons told Nature that he had heard about the bones from people talking in a restaurant about the movie. “This shows disrespect to our people, country and laws,” he says. “Before they did anything, they should have sat with us.” Berger says he believed that traditional leaders had been briefed on his work in the caves.”

Seems like this is unfolding into a perfect example of how to not conduct paleoanthropological research in another country. I just don’t get it how anthropologists, people trained in the study of humans, can often disregard notifying officials and representatives of the government about what is ultimately their fossils. It seems common courtesy to inform Palauans with a simple memo,

“Hey, we found some interesting bones in your backyard. You may wanna know about it. Can we work together with you on this?”

I can only speculate that the story behind the Palau findings went something like this… Berger was kayaking around these Micronesian islands and stumbled upon these findings. He saw an opportunity, and he sought out a big institution with big money to fund his work. The National Geographic Society of course, didn’t hesitate to fund Berger. They would love to make some sensational headlines, especially if these 25 or so individuals were hobbits like Flores. The Society mobilized to make a documentary out of this and all along the people of Palau were left out of the loop.

This isn’t the first time that the National Geographic Society has been entangled in a mess like this. I can think of the drama surrounding the hasty excavation of Selam as one of the more prominent examples of when external interests pushed aside doing good science. Also, the questionable dating of Omo I and II, funded also by the Society is ill-received by many. In this situation, as outlined by the quotes from chieftains and Palauan government officials, critical information wasn’t passed down to the people who these bones belong too.

Tim White shared a comment about this problem in Dalton’s writeup,

“This looks like a classic example of what can go wrong when science and the review process are driven by popular media.”

To which Berger defended,

“he didn’t know the movie was scheduled to premiere before the journal report came out.”

Bollocks. I don’t buy it. It is no secret that Berger was bed fellows with the National Geographic Society in getting these bones out of the ground, so why didn’t he nor the Society tell Palauans about this? It seems awfully hegemonic and disrespectful to not give the people of Palau a bit of a heads up! Don’t you think?

PLoS One completely surprised me today by releasing this paper, “Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia.” The research comes from South African and American researchers, and the paper was edited by John Hawks, who apparently can really keep a secret it seems. I had no idea about this study and find it a really remarkable find since fossils of another small bodied human, Homo floresiensis, were found about 1,000 miles south of these new findings.

If I read this correctly, a minimum of 25 individuals have been found. Lots more will be found according the authors, which is always welcoming to me. The Palau fossils are of small people, similar in size to the Flores hominins. Preliminary analysis of more than a dozen individuals, including a male weighing about 43 kg and a female weighing about 29 kg, document that these were tiny. Analyzing some of the cranial and dental features like the distinct presence of a maxillary canine fossa, a clearly delimited mandibular mental trigone, moderate bossing of the frontal and parietal squama, a lateral prominence on the temporal mastoid process, reduced temporal juxtamastoid eminences and an en maison cranial vault profile with the greatest interparietal breadth high on the vault indicates that these individuals were simply small H. sapiens adapted for life on a small island.

So how were these bones found? Lead author, Lee Berger, writes to National Geographic News that he was kayaking around rocky islands about 370 miles east of the Philippines, when he found the bones in a pair of caves in 2006. Crazy story! I wish I would find something like that while vacationing. He reports that the,

“the [Ucheliungs and Omedokel] caves were littered with bones that had been dislodged by waves and piled like driftwood. Others had remained buried deep in the sandy floor, and more, including several skulls, were cemented to the cave walls.”

Radiocarbon dating was applied to pinpoint an age for the bones. The antiquity of the bones is between 1,410 and 2,890 years ago, which is remarkably much more recent than 18,000 year old antiquity of the Flores hominins. Along with the small size, the Palau fossils have similar features to H. floresiensis, such as their pronounced supraorbital tori, non-projecting chins, relative megadontia, expansion of the occlusal surface of the premolars, rotation of teeth within the maxilla and mandible, and dental agenesis.

But again, Berger and colleagues do not infer from these features any direct relationship between the peoples of Palau and Flores; however, they conservatively write that these similarities may be a common adaptation in humans of reduced stature. In their own words,

“Based on the evidence from Palau, we hypothesize that reduction in the size of the face and chin, large dental size and other features noted here may in some cases be correlates of extreme body size reduction in H. sapiens. These features when seen in Flores may be best explained as correlates of small body size in an island adaptation, regardless of taxonomic affinity. Under any circumstances the Palauan sample supports at least the possibility that the Flores hominins are simply an island adapted population of H. sapiens, perhaps with some individuals expressing congenital abnormalities.”

Again the paper is published in PLoS One, which is an open access journal. That means you can download the original report and read it for yourself for free. I really recommend you do, this seems like one of the more significant paleoanthropological finds for 2008. Here’s the citation:

Berger, L.R., Churchill, S.E., De Klerk, B., Quinn, R.L., Hawks, J. (2008). Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia. PLoS ONE, 3(3), e1780. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001780

Last night I caught some of the new History Channel show, “Journey to 10,000 BC.” I really didn’t know about in advance to tell y’all. Had I known before hand I woulda surely made an announcement. But no worries, if there’s anything I know about channels like Discovery and History, is that they replay these sorts of episodes so much. Actually, if you’re interested in catching it, it will show again on Saturday, March 15 at 8 p.m.

Anyways about the show, I’m thinking History Channel put this out to coincide with the movie 10,000 B.C., which not surprisingly isn’t that accurate of a movie. Not like I expected it to be remotely realistic, but still I kinda hoped that it would be somewhat informative because it is about as much education most people will get about prehistory in their entire life. Anyways, “Journey to 10,000 BC” wasn’t much better. It had horrible cut scenes and exclusively focused on life in North America about 13,000 years ago. A lot of other very important things were happening elsewhere, such as the emergence of Neolithic revolution, i.e. the Natufian culture that shoulda been also included.

Even though I subscribe to the Siberian origin of native Americans, I did appreciate how Dennis Stanford made a cameo and explained his hypothesis that the Clovis archaeology could have originated from sea-faring Soluteran people from Europe. For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, some of the first archaeological evidence in the Americas are associated with a type of stone tools found in Clovis, New Mexico. The Clovis typology is significantly different from Siberian archaeology, see Siberian tools around that time were largely modified ivory points with a blade inset. Clovis tools were much different. Clovis tools are highly refined thin, fluted projectile points created using bifacial percussion flaking.

Dennis Stanford publicized his hypothesis in 2004, along with colleague Bruce Bradely, in this paper, “The North Atlantic ice-edge corridor: a possible Palaeolithic route to the New World.” Like I indicated earlier, Stanford suggests that 13,000 years ago or so Europeans made boats and crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. With lower sea levels then, this was more feasible than nowadays… and by then people were crossing large bodies of water all over the world, i.e. Polynesia and the Pacific. The problem with Stanford’s hypothesis is that there’s no evidence of boats in the America’s from that time period, nor is there a genetic European signature in Native American populations. Stanford says that the reason why boats haven’t been found is that sea levels have risen since then and obliterated any trace of boats… convenient. Anyways, his idea is a bit out there, and not substantiated much. It is really possible that the reason why Clovis typology is unique is that arose in the Americas independently.

I also appreciated the discussion the show gave to climate change and glaciation events in North America. This sorta information isn’t readily inserted into shows like these, and help viewers visualize large scale environmental changes. But, I really couldn’t get over the cheesy cut scenes where a prehistoric woman with remarkable Vogue-like complexion was taken down by a smilodon, and early people crossing massive waves in unconvincing boats canoes. So it is totally up to you to watch, I neither recommend it nor thoroughly think it is a waste of time. If you don’t know much about the peopling of the Americas, this show maybe a great introduction to some lines of evidence.

Bradley, B., Stanford, D. (2004). The North Atlantic ice-edge corridor: a possible Palaeolithic route to the New World. World Archaeology, 36(4), 459-478. DOI: 10.1080/0043824042000303656

Afarensis is hosting the next edition of 4SH, the anthropology blog carnival, and there’s still a couple of days in which to send any contributions along – either to here: submit@fourstonehearth.net, or direct to the host himself.

Sincere thanks to Kambiz Kamrani for asking about the motivation and meaning behind my book Tattooing the World: Pacific Designs in Print and Skin (Columbia University Press, 2008).

The book is inspired first by sheer love of the designs and their meanings. What an amazing story it is to consider the way modern tattoo was imported from the South Pacific to the rest of the world. The 1830s castaway James O’Connell, for instance, received a full-body tattoo in Pohnpei, one of the Caroline Islands. In the Pacific the designs gave him a social standing place and made him recognizable as being fully human. But in New York, where he became the first man to display his tattoos professionally, women and children ran screaming from him in the streets. Ministers warned their flocks that viewing his tattoos would transfer the designs to any woman’s unborn child.

I was intrigued by the way the same patterns could mean such drastically different things. Whether in the Pacific or the United States, the patterns make visible the sacred and the profane, the social and the personal, the playful and the political. What other patterns inspire both reverence and traffic in human heads; both praise and brutal punishments against them (often, strangely, by the same missionaries who provide loving descriptions of the patterns); both suppression and rebellions?

Large numbers of nineteenth-century European aristocrats acquired tattoo, while at the same time early social scientists promised that the designs predicted criminality. A majority of the members of the U.S. Navy were tattooed, at the same time early psychiatrists declared that the patterns indicated sexual deviancy. Writers like Herman Melville (and anthropologists like Margaret Mead) offer lavish descriptions of tattoo, yet maintain a separation between the tattoo artist and their own skin. Meanwhile, in the Pacific the patterns continue to express people’s connection to genealogy, the land, and even the gods, making visible the deep energies of spirit and culture, and wielding such power that they became a key part of sovereignty movements from the nineteenth century to the present.

Today thirty-six percent of young people in the United States are tattooed, while in the Pacific this vital tradition is flourishing after prolonged colonial attempts to suppress it. My book tells the story of how Pacific tatau helped shape the modern practice of tattoo in the U.S. and Europe—and how we owe the English word tattoo to the Pacific original. To document the art’s meanings, the book gathers information on Pacific women’s tattooing (both recipients and artists) that has never been collected in one place. It presents translations from half a dozen Pacific languages to honor the practice in some of its deepest living contexts, and debuts material on tattoo rebellions that has never been discussed in English. It includes discussions of the practice by contemporary Māori and Pacific artists including Henriata Nicholas, Gordon Toi Hatfield, Ni Powell, Keoni Nunes, and Petelo Sulu`ape, and offers twenty-five tattoo images. Always my inspiration has been the artists who create, and the people who wear, the designs. They show that tattoo helps make visible what it means to be human.

Click here for a brief excerpt of the book. I would love to hear responses!

I remember as an undergraduate at UCSC, I had a discussion with a graduate student who was studying tattoo culture. I forgot her name, but I know she was a student of Triloki Pandey. As part of her dissertation, she engaged in some participant observation to understand the mentality and transformation one makes when becoming tattooed. She described it as something she had to do, like a rite of passage, to fully gain an understanding of people she was studying. Aside from an excuse to get a tattoo, I always thought that was a remarkable dedication to the research.

The act of becoming tattooed is a significant transformation. Not only is one physically embedding a design onto them self, but the identity that is associated with those that are tattooed has always been phenomenal. Furthermore, the symbolism one carries on their body with tattoing is tantamount evidence as to how we’re symbolic beings and want to identify with things. We’ll go as far as embedding it on our skin.

I know nowadays tattooing has become culturally more acceptable, but even 20 or 30 years ago, those that were tattooed were in a completely different subculture, if not culture, from those that were not tattooed. So where have tattoos come from? Where did we ever get this crazy idea to permanently alter our skin, one vessel of our physical appearance that we have ’til the day we die?

Well, prior to reading Juniper Ellis‘ new book, “Tattooing the World,” I had some basic knowledge that tattooing originated from Pacific Islanders and was spread by European seamen who were traveling the world by boat during the later 1700′s. As I’ve been reading more and more of her book, I’ve come to a greater appreciation and understanding of who were these ‘first’ tattooers and what tattooing means to the people from the Pacific.

That being said, it is with great honor that Dr. Ellis has accepted my invitation to discuss her work on Anthropology.net. For those of you that don’t know Juniper Ellis, she’s a professor of English at Loyola College, where she teaches Maori, Pacific Islands, and U.S. literature. As I mentioned in the paragraph above, she’s written a new book titled, “Tattooing the World,” which is the first book to my knowledge that addresses the origin and meaning behind tattooing and tattoo culture. This text has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fullbright Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

I’ve asked Dr. Ellis to talk to us about her motivations behind writing a book about tattooing. I also invite you to discuss your anthropological thoughts on tattooing, especially how it is becoming widely adopted in modern day cultures despite the fierce stigma that faced this trend. Once I finish the book, I’ll also write a review of it, but in the mean time sit tight for Dr. Ellis to introduce her work. Oh by the way, have you checked out Carl Zimmer‘s project on science tattoos? It is something I’ve been eyeing from afar ever since he announced it last August.