While I was starting my holiday shopping/browsing, I came across The Mincing Mockingbird's shop that features very beautiful prints of birds with creative titles as well as magnets that feature birds making snarky comments.
Take a look for the bird lover or nature aficionado on your gift list.
A Print A Day has a calendar template, beautifully illustrated with carnivorous plants, available for download (via Craft).
Carnivorous plants are those that attract, trap, and digest insects and other small prey. They live in nutrient poor areas and so they utilize the nutrients from their prey, especially nitrogen, to grow.
July features a venus fly trap (Dionaea muscipula) and August has flowers from a bladderwort (Utricularia). September looks like cobra lilies (Darlingtonia californica), October features a dutchman's pipe, Aristolochia, and December are sundews (Drosera).
Wow. Wesley Fleming makes very intricate insect sculptures out of glass. It was hard to pick one example pic, so check out his whole gallery here. (Via Craft)
Hercules Beetle.
Info from the artist/wikipedia:
"Native to the rain forests of Central and South America, their title is well deserved as they are one of the largest beetles known. This scarab beetle is most noted for its thoracic and cephalic horns, which can grow longer than the body of the beetle itself. This adaptation is primarily used during fights with other males.
The Hercules beetle is said to be the strongest creature on earth for its size, able to carry 80 times its own body weight."
I get a lot of traffic on this blog from people searching for tree of life tattoos, and noticed that my previous posts about science tattoos had broken links.
As it turns out, Carl Zimmer's blog The Loom is now hosted at Discover, and the science tattoos have their own webpage!
There's also a new tree of life tattoo that was added since the last time I checked. Carl summarizes it much better than I could, so I'll direct you to the pic for a description.
I just saw these beautiful insect jewelry pieces on Alphabettisphaghetti's Etsy shop.
The first is a butterfly necklace modeled after Parnassius apollo.
This damselfly necklace also caught my eye.
Here are two things to check out on this gloomy Sunday courtesy of the Craft Magazine Blog.
Fold away your troubles and make a origami lily, the step by step directions can be found here.
Also take a look at these neat robot animals made from recycled electronic parts. The artist, Ann Smith, has a whole gallery of animals over on her website.
Scientific American has a interesting article and slideshow about the art of Paul Rothemund that's currently part of New York City MoMA's "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibit.
"Rothemund refers to his brew of art, biology and technology as 'DNA origami,' because it is created by using hundreds of short DNA strands (which Rothemund refers to as 'staples') to fold much longer genetic ribbons into nanoscale shapes and patterns." --SciAm
Browsing on Etsy, I found these clay pieces that are imprinted with leaves from plants growing in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina where the artist, leavesofclay, lives. 
The descriptions list the common names of the leaves used on each piece.
Sasha informed me today that I actually posted about something before Boing Boing!
About what you ask? The science tattoo flickr set [Update: now website] that I wrote about back in October.
Take that Boing Boing, I scooped you by two whole months.
Here are some other interesting science tattoos that didn't make my first entry:
An archaeopteryx, the first evolutionary tree sketched by Darwin, and a tardigrade.
It is snowing outside my window, so I thought I'd share this site I first read about over on the Guild of Scientific Troubadours, even if it's not exactly biology.
The USDA Beltsville Agricultural Research Center has an Electron Microscopy Unit where they can create SEM images of snowflakes.
That last sentence was a mouthful, but in short, they can see the actual 3D structure of common snow formations, and they are stunning:
I also learned that there are snow classification guidelines, and what I think of as the classic snowflake (pictured above) is a "hexagonal plate with dendritic extensions".
Each snowflake might be unique, but we can classify them. There is even a field guide!
I found a really cool photo group on Flickr called The Dictionary of Image. The goal of the group being to incorporate a word and definition that fits with the photo. Some of the botanical images are very stunning, and I think this is a great way to communicate science to viewers who might not otherwise think about the subject in that way. Granted, not all subjects are biological, but a lot are.
I wish I could post some images here, but the pictures are protected, so you'll have to visit on your own. Some photographs that caught my eye...
Solomon's seal
Surface tension
Cambrian
Mushroom
Beech
Forget origami where you can make animals that only sort-of look like the creature. Instead, why not fold and glue up a rare animal over at Yamaha's website (of all places). They give you an overview of the animals and their habitats and even include a stand with its scientific name for your finished creation. So go fold a Coelacanth today.
They even have a stag beetle for the entomologists on a different page.
Well, I carved this year's Halloween pumpkin, trying to bridge the gap between spooky and biological. So this year, I carved an owl.
I didn't make this pattern, but it looks like a Great Horned Owl to me.
The weekend before Halloween is here, and it got me to thinking about scientists out there carving dorky yet awesome pumpkins. However, after scouring the internet it seems that there are few scientists, or science lovers, who also share my love of pumpkin carving (or at least, they aren't making science designs).
I myself am guilty of only carving one science related pumpkin in the past few years, featuring a DNA strand, leaves, and an insect to represent various interests in my department:
The few jack-o-lanterns I did find I'll post below the fold...
An awesome brain pumpkin carved by a brain surgeon.
Flasks of a science nature.
Some really cool jelly fish.
So come on biologists, by next Halloween I want to see lots of science pumpkin carvings.
So the blogosphere is full of links to links to links, so excuse my long list of relevant sources.
This post started at my seminar on science blogs, The Reluctant Geek, where we were looking at ant blogs. One ant blog, The Ant Room, links to a entry about science tattoos over at The Loom.
Anyway, Carl Zimmer started a Flickr page [Update: Now its own website] where you can post pictures of your science related tattoos. While discussing it in my class we could come up with a few examples of people in EEB here at UConn with science tattoos, so go and post your pics! And if you do, leave me a comment here.
Some tattoos I think are cool are below:
Sea Urchin embryo development & a Tree of Life
And this is my favorite, as it combines Darwin, and a reference to an R.E.M. song (my favorite band).
UPDATE:
It appears this is no longer just a Flickr page, it has its own website. All the science tattoos pics can now be found Here.
In a search for a image to use as a header for this blog, I came across this awesome art made from colorized bacteria grown on petri dishes.
From Echel Ben-Jacob's website:
"The colony structures form as adaptive responses to laboratory-imposed stresses that mimic hostile environments faced in nature. They illustrate the coping strategies that bacteria have learned to employ, strategies that involve cooperation through communication. These selfsame strategies are used by the bacteria in their struggle to defeat our best antibiotics. Thus, if we understand the mechanisms behind the patterns, we can learn how to outsmart the bacteria - for example, by tampering with their communication - in our ongoing battle for our health."
