Declare your love for science (poetically of course)
Posted: February 14, 2013 Filed under: News | Tags: competition, poem, science with a heart, valentines day 38 Comments »
It’s Valentine’s Day, in case you hadn’t noticed, and red roses are the order of the day. To celebrate, we thought we’d run a competition to help you declare your love for science.
The prizes are suitably science-y (not to mention romantic). We’ve got a pendant to give away, with an anatomically-correct heart – four chambers, mammalian, complete with major blood vessels. And for those more into genetics, there’s a pair of his-and-hers chromosome towels monogrammed XY and XX respectively. Plus a DNA pendant – simple but elegant.
What do you have to do to get your hands on these prizes? Just declare your love of science through a poem. You might choose to woo us through a sonnet, ballad, haiku or even a limerick – whatever warms your heart. Here are some examples to get you inspired:
Roses are red, violets are blue,
We study petal gene expression in situ
The features we can barely see,
Are vital in taxonomy,
And horse fly species, though we swat ‘em,
Are featured with a popstar’s bottom.
Roses are red, Violets are blue,
And you have 10 times more bacteria in your gut
than cells in your body – true.
You have until the end of tomorrow, Friday 15 Feb, to post your poem in the comments field below. Winners will be announced on Monday, once the red roses have wilted.
If you need more inspiration, read about some of the research we’re doing that has real heart.
Update Friday 15 February 5pm AEDT: Alas, our poetry competition is now closed. Thanks for all the fantastic entries, it’s clear you truly do love science. Keep an eye out for our post on Monday, where we’ll be announcing our winners.
Everyone wants to get their hands on these prizes. Be quick and get your poems in!
Long wavelengths are red,
Short ones are blue,
I’d love it if xrays
Were visible spectrum too
Reblogged this on Helix @ CSIRO.
Neon is red, cobalt is blue, through electrified tubes we bring these colours to you!
As soonest as I think I have
Won your heart with gifts I gave,
You turn your cheek and walk away,
Leaving me where my pride lay.
By nightly vigils have I studied you
As shrinking moons grew again anew.
Still I wonder who you are -
Mysterious whether near or far.
With care I measure your corporeal treasures
(While carefully hiding my gleeful pleasures):
Your height, your weight, the reach of your members,
all the things that come with numbers.
For long now have I chased you,
And forever will I want you.
Science, my heart belongs to you,
And will until my time is through.
My girlfriend she’s the best,
She sifts through faeces and all the rest,
But when she comes home she washes her hands,
Because a microbiologists work can grow in your glands.
There once was this thing called science
On which we were very reliant
And still to this day, I’m happy to say
We still love this wonderful science
My Science (as adapted from Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country)
I love my field of science,
Of animals and brains.
Of ordered chemicals and camping
Is running in my veins,
Strong love of furry creatures,
Birds high up in the skies,
I know, and I will share it
My goal’s the Nobel Prize.
I love the life of Zoo-ol,
A world of living things,
Of behavioural ecology,
Of cuts and bites and stings.
I love the outdoor field trips,
I love the animals of the sea,
The fluffy and the slimy -
The School of Zoology for me!
Congrats Amy! You’ve won an anatomically-correct heart pendant – four chambers, mammalian, complete with major blood vessels. We’ll email you shortly to let you know how to claim your prize.
science is cold and dark
bleak
I cry for her
wishing she would come out
out, into the light
the bright, warm light
and glow
PolyPolyPolymers
It is said that the greatest things
Simply start from the humblest parts
And the strongest chains are built link by link
All it takes is the littlest… smarts
When it’s just you and me it’s all a little give and take
Electron poor, electron rich, can’t you feel the Debye twitch
It’s quaking here all over my shells, oh how it rouses and bumps and stirs
A bond between you and me, look it’s the way it’s meant to be
Bond! Come on let’s bond!
I’ve got lone pairs that you can’t help but gaze upon
Bond! Come on let’s bond!
I’ve got the charges that urges, drives you to respond!
Bond! Come on let’s bond!
I’ve got the radicals, you’ve got the ‘trons,
Now take me in your orbit and see what might spawn!
Of Lost Robots:
Swimming mechanically
I was swept away
To where I could not say
Everyone scoured the ocean blue
When I saw myself on Facebook
I knew I had to return to you
Roses are red,
Violets are violet,
Rhyming is hard,
Bacon.
sides aching now
This MUST be the winner!
An Enduring Love
A crueller mistress I’ll never know,
But from her hand I will not go.
My love for her, it binds me tight,
Despite the lack of what seems right.
I followed each step to the T,
The experiment should’ve gone perfectly,
But my devious mistress has challenged me so,
And into the autoclave my failure will go.
I’ll attempt it once more,
Just like the eight times before
And through the literature I’ll comb
To find the trick to drive it home.
Because I will not give up on my love,
She can push and I can shove,
But the truth is out there,
Or in there, somewhere.
And I will search until I find,
Within a journal or my own mind,
A solution to the problems that I face,
To put theory and practice into their place.
For the challenge, it may tire me,
And my love seems bent on irony,
But for all this knowledge I shall persist,
Because scientific progress I can not resist.
Dark clouds on the horizon
Their fractal nature makes it hard
To put these troubles in perspective
But a ray of brilliant white sunlight shines through
I turn my face to the warmth, feel the impulse
Imparted by these tireless travellors,
Photons of hope, cosmic wanderers;
And let my eyelashes diffract this ray
Into a thousand rainbows that glitter
And dance in my vision, holding on;
Until that perfect Rayleigh blue scatters
Through – we are no longer lost creatures
No, we are children delighting in a soap bubble
Never suspecting the hidden glories that one day
They will name: interference, tension, pressure
For a brief moment, innocent, in harmony -
No, we are lovers in passionate embrace
A coupled pendulum system:
Beautiful, our fates deterministically intertwined
Yet chaotic, wild, unpredictable -
No, we are dreamers, artists
Madmen that pipe the music of the stars
And like the children of Hamelin
Electrons, positrons follow to their doom
To court one another in a death dance
And annihilate – but the universe is kind
And a single flash of light shall rise
Like a phoenix from the ashes
The beautiful universe is a dynamical system
And the only constant is change, but
For our science is for eternity.
Our love, is our energy that fuels us.
It cannot be destroyed.
S is Semiotic and Seismol-ogeee
C is for the branch called chem-is-treeee
I is very very, ichthy & Immuno heavy
E is more and more
Engineering & the Environment we adore
N is nano, nuclear & neurol-ogee
C is also for cysto and climat-ol-ogeee
E is Ento, Embryo;
and of course Endo
Yes Science was made for you and meeeee
Each day, before I meet my love,
(Before I go to greet my love)
I cuddle my cat and kiss my daughter,
Bathe in osmotically purified water,
Shave with Ockham’s sharpest razer,
Don my skirt, lab boots and blazer,
Smooth my skin with nanoparticles,
Check my feeds for break-through articles,
Set controls and start my trials,
Update my Procite reference styles,
Ensure I’m ready, in full compliance
With the needs of my love: meticulous Science.
Congrats experimental error! You are the proud new owner of a simple but elegant DNA pendant. We’ll email you shortly to let you know how to claim your prize.
Moss needs rain for sperm to swim,
So the egg she holds can be found by him.
Their diploid child, the sporophyte,
Grows out of her head – sounds odd alright.
It lives its life in this in this strange poise,
Releasing spores that are girls or boys.
They grow the moss that’s soft and green,
A haploid plant, odd though it may seem.
But poor moss plants can know no love,
Until the rain falls from above.
Mass spectrometer
Why you no detect ions?
Stop breaking my heart
Should you require an appliance,
to ensure your rogue data’s compliance,
Take a shredder to it –
remove the bits that don’t fit,
and your theory will soon be hard science!
S&S
Heh.
My love for Science,
Is of the purest form –
A crystalline structure,
A perfect storm.
My Science is special,
More special than love –
Substances change form,
Or sublime up above.
My Science is hot,
Transferring me heat –
Thermodynamics,
Makes it so sweet.
My Science is vast,
Star-studded skies –
Glowing in the dark,
A luminescent prize.
My Science is lively:
Carnivorous plants,
Camouflaged beasts,
A courtship dance.
My Science is moody,
Deep grumbles shake –
Irksome volcanoes,
A tsunami lake.
My love for Science,
At absolute zero,
Still burns red hot,
As it is my hero!
Love Her Splendour (as not sung by Elvis Presley)
Love her physics
Love her maths
All other aspects too
For science has given the world so much
And I love her true
We are all connected
dispite all our toys
without ipads or andoids
or screens with white noise
our hearts all bleed red
with myocytes a plenty
whole or half hearts still beating
in healthy or sick kids a many
so never feel rejected
if someone says no
love, just like research
may need 99 failures to grow
I’m a little Neuron
Short and stout
Here is my Dendrite
Here is my Axon Terminal
Love for my science, is not easy.
It is the field of Microbiology.
The details can make you quite queasy.
So why does it still so attract me?
If you look at some of the products,
beyond the ones people call “yucks”.
It becomes quite clear,
Where would we be without wine, cheese and beer?
The luck of the draw and random chance,
The living world, evolutions dance,
The eyeball complex evolves time and again,
And sharks with umbilical cords so like those mammalian,
The bird on the wing, the bat follows suit,
Do the winged insects laugh, at these new recruits?
A wasp courting an orchid, ultra violet landing strips for bees,
And so many other bonds, just as marvelous as these!
The wonder of nature, the beauty it holds,
It’s story to me, through science is told
My wonder, my joy, mind seeking answers not merely compliance,
All because of the love that I have for that thing we call science
If I did not love you, perhaps I’d love Astrology
But I’d rather kiss and cuddle with Epidemiology.
If I loved you less, perhaps I’d find diverting
Homeopathy’s claims or Palmistry’s flirting.
But I have always loved you, Science and I will always know
That when I seek the truth, you are the only way to go.
[A poem dedicated to science]:
If science was a fiction story,
All the greats would have no glory,
Einstein, Edison, Wheel, Da Vinci,
Nothing more than hidden Chemisty.
I thank those minds who contributed,
For without which there would be no iphone.
I before E, except after C, or when it’s Science. This is the essence, the effervescence, the Occam’s razor, the quantum laser: it’s not defiance or non-compliance – it’s just Science!
[Finding love, wherever it may be]
As I sit here on my Sheraton
Drinking Sauvignon from Clarendon
I’m now aware there’s no comparison
So I begin to chew my keratin:
Oh, sure, I’m filled with gratitude
Though I regret my current solitude
My searching each long latitude
Has left me my dry attitude…
I’ll find you, dear, let that be known
I miss all of you, each chromosome.
Though some resist my steadfast tone
My current drive breaks every Ohm.
The Love of Science,
forever,
cannot be explained.
The Science of Love,
however,
is just a chemical cascade.
Oh my valentine
Have my heart for I have three
Cephalopod
Good work Meryl, you’ve won a pair of his-and-hers chromosome towels monogrammed XY and XX respectively. We’ll email you shortly to let you know how to claim your prize.
There once was a plant, transgenetic,
Whose ability to grow quite pathetic,
Till it dawned on it one day,
To get moving, and hey,
Its progress from thenceforth was kinetic!
Thanks for all of your creative entries. Congrats to our winners Amy, Meryl and ‘Experimental Error’. View their winning poems here:
http://csironewsblog.com/2013/02/18/science-feelin-the-love/