Daily Science Haiku - Smartphone Microscope

Buzzing your pocket:
infinitesimal worlds,
yours to discover.

How to turn a smartphone into a digital microscope

Daily Science Haiku - Remipede

Pale, toxic cousin
of woodlice, remipede hunts
in total darkness.

First venomous crustacean found.

Daily Science Haiku - Poppy

Open-source poppy
blooms, pollinating young minds,
seeding engineers.

The Poppy Project

Bonus Poem!

At the Triangle Inn

Morning light outlines
the ceiling vigas. Adobe
walls begin to glow.

Cuyamungue breathes
the crisp high desert air like
lovers sighing dawn.

Oct 12, 2013

Daily Science Haiku - Li-Fi

Light reaches your eyes;
you see. Light reaches laptop;
you see the whole world.

A plan to turn every lightbulb into an ultra-fast alternative to Wi-Fi

Note: Sometimes, poems just fall on you. No sooner had I posted yesterday's haiku than a link to this article arrived in the MIT LinkedIn feed. Go figure. So I wrote the haiku and saved it. This morning, all I had to do was click Publish.

Daily Science Haikus

While my father-in-law was here visiting last month, he mentioned that he writes a couplet to his fiancee each morning. This got the back of my head thinking, Hey, why don't I do something like that? And then I thought, a bit more consciously, hey, why don't I write a haiku every day about science and post it on the Facebook page for Einstein's Workshop? So I began today with a haiku about Titan and meteor impacts. I'll also be posting the haikus here.

The hardest part of this, by far, was finding just the right science news to write about. I cruised the NYTimes, ScienceNews, Scientific American, boingboing, Laughing Squid, and finally found the right article in New Scientist. I'm rather bummed that I missed Ada Lovelace Day on the 15th. I may write something about her tomorrow anyway, because I can. And I may put the birthdays of every great female scientist in my calendar so that I can immortalize each one as they go by. But that's all a lot of work, so I'd also appreciate suggestions. If you see a very cool science tidbit (or you've just published something cool and want it promoted), let me know.

And now, today's haiku:

Wetlands on Titan?
Meteor impacts erased
by hydrocarbon swamps.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24430-astrophile-soggy-bogs-swallow-craters-on-titan.html#.UmPRRRDaM-A

The Bridge, in February

2/24/2013

The masts, vigilant

as bare winter trees,

anchor the base of the bridge

where it rises, bowed and becoming,

from Beverly to Salem.

Snowflakes scatter

along the pavement.

To the east, the gaudy dome

of a natural gas repository

squats awkwardly among

dormant sailboats and trawlers.

To the west, the railroad runs

alongside the bridge like

a tag-along younger brother,

eager and impatient to be off.

Gulls wheel, cormorants bob,

empty docks rise and fall with the tides.

At low tide, men and women

encased in rubber to their chests

stride along the muddy bay floor,

buckets and shovels in hand:

clamming.

All this glimpsed

in a moment of paradox:

concrete in air above sea.

Then down the graceful curve

into Salem and the embrace

of civilization.