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!
14th February 2013 at 5:23 pm
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.
18th February 2013 at 2:45 pm
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.
14th February 2013 at 3:47 pm
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
14th February 2013 at 2:18 pm
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.
14th February 2013 at 11:39 am
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.
14th February 2013 at 10:26 am
Roses are red,
Violets are violet,
Rhyming is hard,
Bacon.
14th February 2013 at 3:57 pm
sides aching now
15th February 2013 at 9:45 am
This MUST be the winner!