Does Neptune ever feel lonely, with a wall of diamonds round it’s heart?
Diamonds might be precious but they’re composed of carbon, an element that’s common here on Earth and throughout the universe.
Under the right conditions (pressure and heat) carbon turns into diamonds. Marvin Ross predicted in 1981 that such conditions might be found in the mantels of the Solar System’s ice giants, Neptune and Uranus.
Recent research has supported this, with laser shock experiments on polystyrene performed by Kraus et al. (2017) replicating the conditions approximately 10,000km below the surfaces of Neptune and Uranus. Their experiments created nanodiamonds, supporting evidence that diamond precipitation occurs in the mantels of these planets.
Now further research has strengthened this evidence. The earlier studies used pure hyrdrocarbon systems (polystyrene is C8H8) but the interiors of Neptune and Uranus are more complex than that, consisting mainly of a dense fluid mixture of water (H2O), methane (CH4), and ammonia (NH3).
To understand diamond formation under more complex conditions similar to those found on Neptune and Uranus, Zhiyu et al. (2022) investigated diamond formation using polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics (C10H8O4). The researchers found that diamond formation is likely to be enhanced by the presence of oxygen, which in their research accelerated the splitting of the carbon and hydrogen.
Under the conditions found on Neptune and Uranus it’s likely that much larger diamonds would be formed, potentially millions of carats in weight. Over millennia these vast diamonds are predicted to sink slowly through the icy layers of the mantel before melting near the cores, creating an ever changing layer of diamonds around the cores of the planets.
The latest research may also explain another peculiarity about Neptune and Uranus: their unusual magnetic fields. Under the conditions that form diamonds in the mantel, the researchers also found evidence that superionic water might be created. Superionic water conducts electric current and is likely to impact the planets’ magnetic fields.
In addition to learning more about the Universe, there are practical implications for us on Earth resulting from the research too. Nanodiamonds have a range of important uses, including in medical sensors, non-invasive surgery, sustainable manufacturing, and quantum electronics. This latest research points the way towards a new way of fabricating nanodiamonds for such uses.
Zhiyu, H.E. et al. (2022) Diamond formation kinetics in shock-compressed C─H─O samples recorded by small-angle x-ray scattering and x-ray diffraction https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abo0617
In mid-2021 The Sciku Project teamed up with the Literature and Science Hubat the University of Liverpool to run the ‘Research in Verse Poetry Competition’, open to staff and postgraduate research students across the university to submit poems about their research subject. The competition saw poems addressing all sorts of topics, ranging from gravity to slavery to life in the lab.
Dr Bhavin Siritanaratkul’s poem ‘An Evening in the Lab’ was praised by the judges as a notable entry:
An evening in the lab
Quiet corridors, empty desks The light patter of rain Graphs on my screen, a tangle of lines A fog on my brain
Discarded reactions, black lumps of carbon The products of my labour Wrong trends, unequal sums This week’s experiments, a failure
Replace elements, reroute gas lines New patterns and ideas converge Remake electrodes, repeat measurements A hazy plan, outlines emerge
Darkened skies, unyielding rain But gone was my sorrow Lightened steps, a clear mind Decision made, new experiments tomorrow!
Background
My research is in the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide, with the dream to use renewable electricity to convert carbon dioxide back to valuable fuels and chemicals. The poem was written while I was looking for a break in the evening when none of my experiments were working.
Dr Bhavin Siritanaratkul is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liverpool with a focus on carbon dioxide reduction. You can connect with him on Twitter here: @BhavinSiri
muscles need iron so do mussels it appears such sticky anchors
Iron is an essential element for almost all living organisms. The majority of iron in mammals is found in red blood cells (haemoglobin) and muscle cells (myoglobin), supporting the transport, storage and release of oxygen. In humans, iron deficiency is the most common nutritional deficiency in the world and can lead to iron-deficiency anaemia, symptoms of which include fatigue, headaches, weakness, angina, breathlessness, complications during pregnancy and delayed growth in infants and children.
Iron is also important for many animals, utilised to help strengthen hard materials such as rodent teeth or the carbonate armour of some gastropods. Yet iron can be found in soft biological materials too, including the sticky anchors that mussels use to attach to rocks and the threads that connect those adhesives to the mussels’ inner tissues.
To investigate the importance of iron in mussel anchors, Hamada et al. (2020) varied seawater iron levels in a controlled environment and examined adhesive thread samples from Blue mussels (Mytilus edulis) which had been living in the water for 3 days. The researchers measured thread strength by securing the entire length of the threads and measuring how much force was required to pull them until the adhesive failed.
Adhesive strength increased as the iron level of the water increased until an optimal amount was reached, after which the adhesive strength declined. Examination of the plaques themselves also revealed differences in morphology, including colour and microstructural features, arising from the different iron levels of the water.
The results confirm that iron is a key component of how mussels anchor themselves to rocks and demonstrate how changing ocean chemistry might affect these molluscs in the future.
Quicksilver sinking. Sediments sequestering in the cold, dark deep.
Mercury pollution can cause huge environmental damage, accumulating in the food chain and causing harm to wildlife and humans. Reducing mercury pollution is vitally important and monitoring mercury levels in the environment is crucial for understanding how mercury travels through ecosystems. Yet measuring mercury levels isn’t always easy.
Recent research by Sanei et al. (2021) examined some of the most challenging areas to access on the planet – the deep-ocean trenches. The researchers collected sediment core samples from areas of the Kermadec and Atacama Trench Systems in the Pacific Ocean, over 6km below the surface in the hadal zone.
The researchers found that some areas were mercury hotspots, with levels 6–56 times higher than the previously inferred deep-ocean average. Whilst the hadal zone comprises only around 1% of the deep-ocean area, the findings suggest that it may account for 12–30% of the mercury estimate for the entire deep-ocean.
The findings raise serious questions about levels of mercury pollution in the oceans, highlighting the need for further research into deep-ocean mercury pollution. There is one bright spark in this worrying cold, dark news – mercury in trench sediments is effectively locked away, buried for millions of years as plate tectonics shifts it deep into the earth’s upper mantle.
Little Ice Age and global warming layered in a lake
By Jon Hare
Varves are annually layered sediments. I first came across the word in a study of fish scales preserved in anoxic basins off Santa Barbara, California (Baumgartner et al. 1992). Sediment cores were taken and the number and species of fish scales in the varves (layers) were used to estimate the number of anchovies and sardines off California over the past 1,700 years. The conclusion was that populations of these fish varied greatly long before commercial fishing, indicating the importance of natural variability and commercial fishing in fish population abundance.
A recent use of varves to document the past comes from Lapointe et al. (2020). They examined layered sediments in South Sawtooth Lake, Nunavut, Canada. Previous analyses demonstrated that sediment grain size in each layer (aka year) was correlated with summer temperatures; finer grained sediments were associated with cooler summers. In addition, finer grained sediments have more titanium, so by measuring titanium through the varves of sediment cores, the authors were able to reconstruct a history of summer temperatures at the site. The concept is the same as that for scales and anchovies but in this case is titanium and temperature.
The authors verified their proxy through comparison of titanium from the varves in South Sawtooth Lake to measurements of summertime North Atlantic sea surface temperature. Temperature measurements are available annually from 1854 to the present and Lapointe and team show that temperature record is significantly correlated with their titanium measurements. They then use this verified relationship to develop a 2,900 year reconstruction – one of the longest reconstructions of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures to date.
The reconstructed temperature record shows multidecadal and multicentury variability and recent change. Multidecadal variability has been observed in measurements of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures from 1854 to the present. The study by Lapointe and co-authors provides evidence that this multidecadal variability has been occurring for almost 3,000 years. Multicentuary variability was also evident; the warm and cold periods noted in history are seen in the reconstructed temperatures – the Roman Warm Period (250 BCE – 400 CE) and the Dark Ages Cold Period (400-800 CE). The coldest temperatures in the reconstruction are from the middle of the Little Ice Age (1400-1600 CE). The warmest temperatures in the 2,900 year reconstruction are from the past decade – the authors state that “the rate and magnitude of warming over the last few centuries are unprecedented in the entire record, leading to the last decade which was the warmest of the past ∼2,900 y.” Thus the authors provide strong evidence for natural variability in the climate system and evidence for rapid – unprecedented – change over the last 50 to 100 years.
Original research:
Francois Lapointe, Raymond S. Bradley, Pierre Francus, Nicholas L. Balascio, Mark B. Abbott, Joseph S. Stoner, Guillaume St-Onge, Arnaud De Coninck, and Thibault Labarre. Annually resolved Atlantic sea surface temperature variability over the past 2,900 y. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020; 202014166 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2014166117. https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2020/10/06/2014166117.full.pdf
Climate change buffer Particles settle in grass Seagrass meadows rule
By Phil Colarusso
Seagrass meadows collect and sequester large amounts of carbon in the sediments below the meadows. The carbon accumulates through 2 different pathways. First, through photosynthesis and tissue growth, seagrasses extract carbon from the water column and incorporate it into its own tissues. The root and rhizome structures and some cast leaf material end up being incorporated into the sediments. In most cases, this provides less than half of the carbon found in those sediments. The majority of the carbon in the sediments originates from outside of the meadow. The canopy of the meadow functions as a filter, facilitating the settlement of organic particles as the tide passes over the meadow going in and out.
As long as the meadow stays intact, the carbon in the sediments remains isolated and out of the global carbon cycle. Data shows that the age of carbon in meadows can be hundreds of years old. Seagrass meadows, salt marsh and mangroves all perform the same carbon sequestration function and collectively are referred to as blue carbon habitats. This is still a relatively young field of research.
Photo credit: Phil Colarusso
In the above photo, you can see the seafloor in the foreground, which is primarily sandy cobble. The eelgrass meadow has a dark organic layer indicating the large carbon component that has accumulated due to the presence of the plants.
Dr. Phil Colarusso is a marine biologist with US EPA Region I. He has been working on eelgrass restoration, conservation and research for 31 years. He and his team just recently had a paper on carbon sequestration rates in eelgrass in New England accepted for publication.
Ferrous droplets fall on the nightside of poor locked WASP. A fishy place.
In the constellation Pisces, 640 light years away from Earth, there is a planet that orbits so closely to its star that it rains iron.
A team of around 100 researchers (Ehrenreich et al, 2020) used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe the vast exoplanet WASP-76b and found that temperatures reach above 2400 degrees Celsius, hot enough for iron to vaporise.
WASP-76b is tidally locked, meaning that its spin and rotation around its star coincide, with one side of the planet always in darkness and one side always facing the star – in the same way that our moon always presents the same side to the Earth. Strong winds are created as a result of a temperature difference of around 900 degrees Celsius between the sun-facing dayside and the perpetually dark nightside. Iron is vapourised on the dayside and these winds carry the iron vapour to the cooler side of the planet where it condenses and rains down.
A note about “A fishy place” – this is a reference to WASP-76b’s location in the constellation of Pisces, which in astrology is the sign of the fish.
In the final part of our interview with Mary Soon Lee about Elemental Haiku (check out Parts One and Two), we discuss writing for various format, her current and future projects, and Star Trek!
I’ve read
that when you moved to the USA you weren’t able to get a work visa and started
writing TV scripts. What made you want to write for TV and then what prompted
the move towards fiction?
Mary Soon
Lee: I was a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I knew that
they were considering scripts from people without screenwriting credits. The
idea of getting to write a Star Trek episode was very appealing to me. I wrote
three scripts, and learned a great deal in the process, though none of them
sold. Beyond Star Trek, I wasn’t drawn to writing for television, so I switched
to prose. I don’t think I’ll want to write for television in the future, though
it’s not quite certain. In 2015-2016, I did write a handful of short pieces in
script format as part of a novel-length epic fantasy told in poems.
Next
Generation is the only Star Trek series that really clicked with me, are you
looking forward to the new Picard series?
Mary: I am
indeed looking forward to the Picard series. I re-watched both the original
series Star Trek and the Next Generation series with my daughter, and a lot
will depend on whether she likes the Picard series. (These days, I very rarely
watch television shows without one or more of my family. When left to entertain
myself, I read.)
Scripts and poetry both have a certain conciseness in their language, do you feel like writing those early scripts helped your poetry as well as your prose?
Mary: It
probably did help. I think that most writing, and indeed reading, helps you
become a better writer. At the time, I was most aware that the scripts helped
me with dialogue. N.B. Concision is one of the things that I love in poetry, a
quality that can be found in poems that lack rhyme or other formal devices.
You have degrees in mathematics and computer science, an MSc in astronautics and space engineering and spent time working as a programmer before becoming a writer. Do you miss the more technical career?
Mary: I enjoyed
programming in much the same way as I might enjoy solving a puzzle, but I don’t
miss it. On the other hand, I would have loved to contribute to science or the
space program, and in some small way writing science poetry approaches that.
I’m currently working on a collection of astronomy poems, as well as other
poetry and fiction.
Since
you’ve mentioned it I was going to ask about upcoming work. Let’s start with
the astronomy poems, can you tell me a little more about the collection?
Mary: I’ve been
working on the astronomy poems intermittently for over a year, writing a few at
a time. At the moment, all the titles begin with “How to.” For
example, there’s “How to Be a Star,” “How to Speak to
Pluto,” and “How to Fathom a Light-Year.” The poems vary widely
in style and tone. A few rhyme, most do not. They deal with the planets and
stars, black holes and people with a connection to space. To date, sixteen of
the poems have been published individually, but I would like to eventually
gather them all together in a book.
I’ve read
and enjoyed a couple of your ‘How To’ astronomy poems and did wonder if there
was a plan behind them. The periodic table has an obvious end point, how will
you know when you’ve reached the end of the project?
Mary: I’m not
sure! There are some topics I feel should be covered, such as having a poem for
each of the planets in the solar system. Beyond that, it’s far from clear. I’m
also undecided on whether to include any astronomy poems that don’t fit the
format of being a “How to” poem.
You’ve
written a fantasy epic presented in the form of poems – Crowned: The Sign of
the Dragon, Book 1. What made you want to tell a longer narrative through the
form of poetry and what are your plans for the rest of the series?
Mary: I wrote
“Interregnum,” the opening poem from “The Sign of the
Dragon,” at a time when I was just returning to writing fantasy after
years of writing mostly mainstream poetry. And I rediscovered that writing
could be both all-engrossing and a joy. When I wrote that first poem, I thought
it was a standalone piece, but the character of the sixteen-year-old boy tugged
me back, and I wrote more and more poems about him. A lot of the later arc of
the story is implicit in the first poem, though that wasn’t clear to me then.
I’ve now written Xau’s whole story, which comes to over three hundred poems,
and it is in the hands of my agent (the superb Lisa Rodgers).
It must be a nice feeling to have the whole of Xau’s story written, do
you think you’d want to take on any other longer narrative projects like this
in the future?
Mary: I would
love to write another long narrative work, whether in poetry or prose. At the
same time, it was a hugely absorbing project, so part of me wants to delay
until my daughter is older. (She’s fourteen. She doesn’t need attention the way
a young child does, but I like her company and I’d like to be available when
she’s at home.)
Do you find the process of reviewing the books you’ve read on Goodreads helps your own writing and do you have a recommendation from the last year?
Mary: My book
reviews aim to report my reaction as a reader, rather than attempt something
more scholarly. Even so, I think the process does help me assess what I like —
or dislike — and that may well help my own writing. I have many
recommendations, but will try to restrain myself. In the past year, the book
that I’ve loved most is “A Brightness Long Ago” by Guy Gavriel Kay, a
quiet, reflective, beautifully-written fantasy. On the science poetry front, I
very much liked Simon Barraclough’s “Sunspots,” which is a collection
of poetry themed around the sun.
Mary Soon Lee’s antenna being.
Finally,
I’m curious about your website and twitter profile picture – can you tell
me a bit about it?
Mary: Do you
mean the little antenna being? That dates back at least as far as the 1980s
when I was a first-year mathematics student at Cambridge University: I would
draw the antenna being in my lecture notes. N.B. I’ve been blogging about
my mail on the web since 1995 — my website is antiquated and alarmingly close
to its original version. I’m hoping it will soon be thoroughly updated.
Well
I hope the little antenna being makes it onto the updated website! Thank you so
much for talking with The Sciku Project about Elemental Haiku and your writing, it’s been an absolute pleasure.
Mary: Thank you very much for all your
questions and for your friendliness! I very much appreciate your enthusiasm for
the haiku.
I
wish you all the best for your next writing endeavours and I’m looking forward
to whatever you share with the world next. Thank you.
The Sciku Project was lucky enough to chat with Mary Soon Lee about her collection Elemental Haiku and in the second part of the interview we discuss revisiting the poems and the process of converting Elemental Haiku into a book (you can check out the first part of the interview here).
The
book is being published two years after you originally published the poems in Science. How did it come about?
Mary Soon Lee: A while after the haiku had been published in Science, Lisa Rodgers, my agent (JABberwocky Literary Agency) submitted them to editors at places such as Penguin, Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Without Lisa, I wouldn’t have had any idea where to send a project like this. Several of the editors expressed interest, and I spoke to them on the phone. Then Lisa and I discussed the resulting offers, and I decided to work with Lisa Westmoreland at Ten Speed Press. (Yes, both my agent and my editor are called Lisa, and so is the book’s designer, Lisa Bieser.)
I
like the design of the book, the presentation and additions enhance the
poems without overwhelming them. How closely did you work with Lisa Bieser
and Iris Gottlieb?
Mary: I am also
very happy with the design of the book. Lisa Westmoreland was the one who
recommended that I add explanatory notes to accompany the haiku. As for the
illustrations and layout, Lisa Bieser suggested possible artists, and I
picked Iris Gottlieb as my favorite — I love Iris’s work! Then I came up
with an initial list of possible illustrations to accompany the haiku. After
that, the rest of the design effort fell to Lisa and Iris.
You
mentioned that Lisa Westmoreland suggested the explanatory notes for each
haiku, how did you find the process of writing these? I’m guessing your love of
concision helped to keep these brief, although I imagine for some of them there
was a temptation to provide more background?
Mary: Writing
the explanatory notes felt much closer to “real” work than writing
poetry or stories. I tried to double-check the facts I’d used about each
element, and then to find a clear but brief way to present the information. I
didn’t want the length of the notes to overwhelm the haiku. So I didn’t attempt
to summarize every interesting point about an element, only those touched on in
the corresponding haiku.
What
was it like revisiting the poems for the book – were there any that surprised
you?
Mary: I still
remembered the haiku well enough that they didn’t surprise me, though, for
older work, it can be almost surreal to re-read what I’ve written and to see it
as another person might see it. I also revised about a dozen of the haiku, in
some cases making very slight changes, in others writing entirely new versions.
In a few instances, both the original haiku and the new version are included in
the book.
With the elements in the book that have more than one
haiku it feels as if the original version published in Science is a bit lighter than the newer version, often more
about the word itself. Was there a deliberate attempt to ensure that
all the haiku were in some way informative?
Mary: My book
editor, Lisa Westmoreland, was the one who, wisely, suggested writing more
serious versions of the most frivolous haiku. While I harbor some fondness for
the original versions (particularly the one for yttrium), I think it was good
to add less flippant versions. N.B. After decades living in America, I still
sometimes use British spellings by mistake, and that’s doubtless why two of the
original haiku referenced the variant spellings for aluminum/aluminium and
sulfur/sulphur.
The original poem for yttrium made me laugh, I’m glad it was included as well as the new poem. Two of my favourites are nitrogen and sodium which as poems are very different but I think capture the essence of the whole project. They’re relatively early in the table and I wondered if I particularly like them because I’m more familiar with the elements themselves. Did you find your approach changed or that the poems were harder to write as you got further towards the end of the periodic table where less is known about the elements?
Mary: I worried
the poems would become hard to write as I neared the end of the periodic table,
but in the end it wasn’t as difficult as I’d feared. While I had fewer
pre-existing ideas and while there was less information to draw on, those
restrictions meant I spent less time flailing around, wondering what to
focus on. The information that does exist is fascinating: the effort to
synthesize new elements and to learn what we can of their chemistry.
Do you have a favourite element, poem or illustration – are they the same? I believe fluorine (F, 9) was a favourite when you first published in Science, has this changed?
Mary: My
favorites shift, but answering for my current mood: I have soft spots for
the haiku for helium, potassium, germanium, iridium, radium, and ununennium. I
wouldn’t want to upset the elements by naming any favorites among those! Among
Iris Gottlieb’s illustrations, I love the ones for helium and mendelevium, plus
the space-related images (tellurium, neptunium, curium).
I like that you’ve included a selected
bibliography at the end of the book – reading through Elemental Haiku reminded
me how fascinating chemistry can be and there are a couple of books on
there that I definitely want to read. What is the most interesting
thing that you learned during the process of writing the poems and
explanations?
Mary: I’m not
sure that there is one specific thing, but in general the process reminded me
that science is a marvellous endeavor, perhaps the best undertaking of
humanity. I liked learning a little more about the history of chemistry and
about specific scientists, such as Dmitri Mendeleev and Marie Curie.
I was struck by how fundamental units are defined and re-defined. One unit, the
kilogram, was redefined while I was editing the book! I also found myself drawn
to anything that touched on space, such as the nucleosynthesis of the elements,
and how the discovery of technetium in the spectra of red giants meant that it
must have been synthesized inside those stars.
I can see how it would be hard to pin point a single fact, it’s easy to forget that the elements are fundamentally everything! Thank you for taking the time to talk with The Sciku Project.
Check out Part Three of our interview where we discuss Mary’s writing, upcoming work and Star Trek! In the mean time, if you’ve missed them you can check out The Sciku Project’s review of Elemental Haiku and Part One of our interview.
In the summer of 2017 Science magazine published a collection of 118 haiku about the chemical elements by poet and writer Mary Soon Lee. Two years later Elemental Haiku is now being published as a book by Ten Speed Press, with added explanations from Mary and illustrations by Iris Gottlieb.
The Sciku Project was lucky enough to
chat with Mary about the collection and in the first part of the interview we
go back to the beginning and discuss the process of writing and publishing the
poems in Science.
In the introduction to the book you say that one day you sat down and without any grand plan in mind wrote a haiku for hydrogen and the rest seemed to follow from there. What prompted you to want to write a poem about hydrogen and why did you choose to write it as a haiku?
Mary
Soon Lee: I keep a list of ideas that appeal to me, and when I sit down to
write, I will sometimes pick an idea from that list. Other days, the process is
more haphazard. I am fond of a book called “The Daily Poet” by Kelli
Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, which contains writing prompts that may start
my thoughts wandering in a helpful direction. Often I jot down semi-random
words or notions in a notebook before settling on a topic. For 12/14/2016, the
day that I wrote the hydrogen haiku, I have no scribbles in my notebook. I
think the idea must have just popped into my head, including the decision to
make it a haiku.
Why
Science, was that Lisa Rodgers’
suggestion or did you have it in mind as you developed the project further?
Mary: Partway
through writing the Elemental Haiku, it occurred to me that that they might
appeal to scientists, and so I decided to try submitting them to a scientific
journal before sending them to a conventional poetry market. Lisa Rodgers has
given me many excellent suggestions, but this idea was my own.
Having been through the Science review process a couple of times (both successfully and not!), I’m intrigued by how they reacted to your submission and whether there was any review process involving chemists or indeed other poets?
Mary: I
submitted the haiku to Science as if
they were a normal article, though I think I included a brief explanatory note.
Six weeks later, I heard back that they would like to run the haiku as a poetry
feature in the Letters section. The editor, Jennifer Sills, suggested several
small revisions, but they were of a poetic slant rather than a scientific one.
(It may well be that they reviewed the science content of the haiku behind the
scenes.) After their appearance in Science,
my book editor, Lisa Westmoreland, was able to get a chemist to review the
haiku. Happily the reviewer didn’t spot any errors. I should also mention that
my husband is usually my first reader, and he read the haiku before I submitted
them anywhere.
What
reaction did you get when the poems were published in Science?
Mary: I received quite a lot of emails from people who’d enjoyed the haiku, which was lovely. There were also a few articles, including an article in the Wall Street Journal that quoted the haiku for lithium, carbon, and silver. Over time, I received more nice emails and a few permissions requests. For instance, Tarik Gunersel asked to translate the haiku into Turkish, and later published several of the translations. This summer, C&EN — Chemical & Engineering News — asked me to contribute an essay to a special feature on the periodic table. (The essay may be read here).
The
haiku have multiple themes to them – some are about an element’s history, its
usage, position in the table or its structure. Did you take several approaches
for each element and decide on the best or did you go with what felt right for
each element? Was it important to have a balance of approaches across the
collection?
Mary: With a
few elements, I knew the theme I’d choose immediately. For instance, I decided
in advance that the haiku for potassium would be about it yearning for the
halogens on the other side of the periodic table. In most cases, however, I
began by looking up multiple sources about the element, and then considering
which aspects to write about. As part of that process, I did indeed try to
balance the collection. I wanted the haiku to vary in tone as well as subject
matter, with some being more serious and some more frivolous.
How many haiku did you write for each element and are there any haiku that didn’t make the cut but that you would have liked to include?
Mary: I usually only wrote one haiku that I liked, but sometimes that meant writing several haiku that I abandoned. I don’t think there are any abandoned haiku that I wish had been included…. In the few cases where I liked two haiku for an element, they both ended up in the book.
I find haiku to be quite
a forgiving medium for science writing – I think that it’s hard to write a
truly terrible science haiku (although it’s also hard to write a good one). At
the same time a lot of the researchers I speak to find poetry itself
intimidating and then the conciseness of haiku especially so. To get them
breaking through that mental barrier I advise them to begin by writing a few
key words down about their research and counting the syllables,
almost piecing together a poem like a puzzle. How did you
approach writing the haiku themselves?
Mary: With haiku, I think I usually try to
decide what I want to say first, and then try to find a way to express that as
clearly, concisely, and poetically as I can. American haiku don’t always keep
to the tradition of a 5-7-5 syllable count, but I like to do so. As you
mention, the process can feel like fitting together puzzle pieces. Both with
haiku and other poetry, I often look up words in a thesaurus to search for
synonyms with different sounds or shades of meaning … or different syllable
counts.
Do you have any tips for anyone wanting to write
scientific poetry, and for scientific haiku in particular?
Mary: The
Elemental Haiku are my first significant foray into science poetry, so it is a
comparatively new venture for me. Beyond trying to research the scientific
content carefully, I’m not sure I have science-specific advice to offer. There
are a few things that have helped me more generally. Firstly, reading widely.
Secondly, writing about what matters to me or interests me. Thirdly, looking
for feedback to improve my writing. (I ran a writer’s workshop for about a
decade; nowadays, I ask family members to give me feedback on my work.)
I
hadn’t realised you’d run a writers workshop – how did you find the process of
teaching writing and why did you stop?
Mary: I didn’t
teach writing, just started and ran the workshop. We followed a format close to
that used by the Clarion workshops, where the author stays quiet while the
other members offer initial feedback on their story, followed by more general
discussion. I tried to make sure that comments — especially negative comments
— were restricted to the story rather than the writer. After the birth of my
second child, my limited free time became even more limited, so I withdrew from
the workshop.
I can sympathise –
small children are (wonderful) time thieves! Thank you for taking the time to
talk with The Sciku Project.
Check out the rest of our interview where we discuss the process of converting Elemental Haiku into a book (Part Two) and Mary’s other writing, upcoming work and Star Trek (Part Three). You can also read The Sciku Project’s review of Elemental Haiku here.
Two thousand and seventeen was an auspicious year for scientific haiku. Chromatin Haiku began the year tweeting DNA and histone haiku in earnest (having posted the first tentative tweets in the last days of 2016). The Sciku Project started in May, collecting examples of science haiku (sciku) from across the research spectrum. On the 4th August 2017 the poet and writer Mary Soon Lee published her collection of poems Elemental Haiku in the journal Science; 119 haiku, one for each element of the periodic table.
Now, in 2019, Elemental Haiku: Poems to Honor the Periodic Table Three Lines at a Time by Mary Soon Lee is being published as a book by Ten Speed Press (you can purchase it here). The new version includes a couple of alternative haiku, explanations for each haiku by Mary herself and illustrations by Iris Gottlieb.
Getting Physical
There’s something about the physical. Sure, if you can access the Science webpage where the vast majority of the poems were first published then you’ve got much of what the book Elemental Haiku provides – the poems themselves. But as well designed as that webpage is (and it’s an excellent digital rendition) the book format means you engage with the poems more. You’re less likely to flit between poems rapidly, more likely to consider each poem individually. You’ll turn pages at your own pace rather than just twitching a mouse to have the next poem appear.
Then there are the explanations, which provide snippets of background to each poem and encourage you to go back, re-read and re-evaluate. The explanations are brief, the conciseness signposting key information in each poem, providing a taster of the research that informs each haiku. Occasionally I wanted more than a taster but the poems themselves are the stars of the show and lengthy explanations would likely diminish them.
Judging the suitable amount of information to present
alongside the poems is something I’ve also encountered whilst running The Sciku
Project, and I think Mary’s approach largely works in the collection’s favour. On
a screen you can scroll, much of the additional information hidden, but on the
page large blocks of text would be too imposing. The brevity is a success and for
those instances where I’ve wanted more information the selected bibliography
provides plenty of sources for further reading.
The whole book is designed to support the poems without over-whelming them. Iris Gottlieb’s illustrations are elegantly simple, cropping up every 2-3 poems and expanding the context with clean lines and a soft sense of humour. When present they’re a third channel of information, each chemical element explored through the mediums of poetry, art and fact. Triangulating between the three is a remarkably satisfying process, further helping the reader to explore the haiku and the elements themselves.
Lisa Bieser, the book’s designer, has created a minimalist design, the pages alternating between white and grey, quietly dividing the elements without you realising it. Space allows the work to breathe and some pages are little more than three brief lines of poetry and two lines of explanation. I can relate. When building the website for The Sciku Project I purposefully kept the design simple and discrete to help the poems stand out – it’s not just a lack of web-building skills! Haiku as works of art can be delicate and the design of Elemental Haiku helps to ensure that they aren’t lost amongst the additions.
Some Context
It feels strange to have been sent a preview copy of a
poetry collection. I stopped studying English literature at the age of 14 and
English language at 16, prevented by a combination of timetable clashes, an
education system that encourages early specialisation and a lack of smarts*. Now
that I look back, 20 years later, it seems an absurd system.
I don’t feel qualified or intelligent enough to comment on
Mary Soon Lee’s haiku, to judge her turn of phrase or use of juxtaposition. I
wouldn’t know where to start. If you’re looking for an insightful literary critique
you may be disappointed.
Yet…
I’ve spent over two years running The Sciku Project, publishing scientific haiku by scientists and authors from around the world. I’ve written articles, given presentations and offered tips for researchers wanting to write haiku about their work. I’ve penned hundreds of sciku and published many of them. One or two I’m even proud of.
So with some reviewer context covered, let’s talk about the poems themselves.
*You weren’t allowed to continue with literature at my school unless your combined score across English, History, Geography, French and Latin was high enough. I struggled to learn vocabulary by rote, learning best through narrative…
The Haiku Themselves
I often say that sciku are a remarkably forgiving medium, that the brevity of the format means that even just putting key words next to each other can produce something that’s not completely awful. If you’ve spent your career at the laboratory bench the idea of writing poetry can be seriously intimidating. Sciku allow hesitant researchers to apply an analytical approach, piecing together syllables to create poems that, more often than not, work.
Writing a sciku is relatively easy, but…
Writing excellent sciku is hard, it’s a process that goes way
beyond slotting words together like a puzzle. Sciku can include narrative,
drama, humour, pathos, queries and a whole range of other elements on top of
being informative and factual. Great sciku stimulate curiosity and provoke
thoughts about the research. As a result of reading a good sciku you should be
able to understand the ideas and information presented but should want to find out more. At their best Sciku
can be moments that echo in the mind.
In Elemental Haiku Mary Soon Lee walks the balance between information and artistry perfectly. Her poems are graceful, humorous and fascinating, sometimes all three in a single haiku.
Each element is imbued with a sense of personality: carbon
is a “diva”, dysprosium plays “hard to get” and caesium is a firebrand
with a “softer side”. There’s humour
in neon’s embarrassing red lights and tragedy in the Radium Girls and their
fatal luminescent paint. Through the haiku Mary Soon Lee makes these collections
of protons, neutrons and electrons relatable.
The poems cover a range of subjects around the elements.
Iron’s haiku is just a list, a powerful reminder of the integral role it’s
played in human history. Lutetium compares electron structure with helicopter
parenting. Rubidium’s haiku reminds us that Robert Bunsen did more than just
invent his burner.
Some of the haiku flow smoothly in a single tale, whilst the dynamic phrasing of praseodymium is key to its success:
“Magnetic cooling.
Absolute zero beckons.
Approach the limit.”
This mix of approaches, the use of language and emotion, and the varied structures and wordplay keep the haiku both interesting and informative throughout. I think my favourite is Sodium:
“Racing to trigger
every kiss, every kind act;
behind every thought.“
It’s a haiku that takes as a starting point sodium’s role in the transmission of nerve impulses but adds a new dimension and depth by demonstrating what the synaptic processes can actually mean at a human level.
The least interesting for me personally are those that take
as their subject an element’s location in the periodic table but even then Mary
Soon Lee injects a humanity that elevates the subject – Potassium yearns “for the halogens / on the other side”.
For those elements you know something about already there’s a fun degree of interpretation to reading the poems – seventeen syllables isn’t long to convey information and its satisfying to pick up on subtle references. But even those elements I’m more familiar with allowed me to place new information within an existing context.
Having not studied chemistry for many years, the second half of the book covering the latter elements is more a journey of discovery. Where these poems work best is in connecting things I already know with chemical elements I’m clueless about. Take americium:
“Alpha particles
dispatched in smoke detectors
to protect and serve.”
I couldn’t have told you whether americium was an element or not, far less how it might play an important role in my life. Now I know it plays a crucial role in ionization smoke detectors, by emitting alpha particles and ionizing air molecules – if the flow of ions detected is broken by smoke then the alarm triggers.
The problem with latter chemical elements, especially those
that don’t occur naturally, is that we know very little about some of them. It gives
Mary Soon Lee less to work with and there are perhaps a touch too many poems
about half-lives towards the end (in fairness, I honestly can’t see how this
could be different). To clarify, it’s the number of poems and not the presence
of poems with half-life as a subject matter that I was less a fan of, and this
is really a very minor quibble. Having read the collection cover-to-cover I’ve since
had an awful lot of pleasure dipping in and out at random, an approach that
removes this issue.
Final Thoughts
The big question is if you can access the Science website
and the versions of the poems published there, is the book of Elemental Haiku worth checking out?
Absolutely. The format and the additions alter the experience of reading Mary
Soon Lee’s poems for the better, the explanations and use of space enhancing each
haiku. Reading from cover-to-cover you get a sense
of discovery, a faint echo of the progress made from Dmitri Mendeleev’s
original version of the periodic table to its current state.
Science and art are often portrayed as mutually exclusive, but Mary Soon Lee’s wonderful poems show just how wrong that is. In our quest to define and organise the chemical elements it’s easy to transform them into abstract concepts. Elemental Haiku is a special alchemy of poetry and science that demonstrates something that’s easily forgotten: that these chemical elements are more than just symbols in squares on a table. Excellent sciku indeed.
Interested in how Elemental Haiku came about, the process of creating the book and Mary Soon Lee’s writing? Visit The Sciku Project next week for our interview with Mary!
The preview copy of Elemental Haiku that this review is based upon was provided by Ten Speed Press, with no expectations other than some independent and unbiased coverage. Please note that some aspects of the text or production may have changed prior to publication on the 1st October 2019. You can find out more about the book here.
Iron-60 falls, sprinkling stardust on pure snow. Is this Philip’s Dust?
Particles of extraterrestrial dust enter the Earth’s atmosphere all the time, coming from asteroids or comets. Yet some is thought to come from supernova explosions and could help us understand the history of our solar neighbourhood. How can researchers detect these particles?
The key lies in a rare isotope, iron-60, that has no natural sources on Earth. But measuring abundance of iron-60 is easier said than done. One previous study has found iron-60 in deep sea sediment deposits but new research by Koll et al (2019) suggests that pure, untouched Antarctic snow is another viable source.
The team collected pure snow that was less than 20 years old, melted it, filtered out the solids and incinerated the residues. They then used mass spectrometry to measure the presence of iron-60 and manganese-53. By comparing the relative abundances of these two isotopes the researchers were able to demonstrate that the source of the iron-60 was interstellar dust, ruling out other potential sources such as cosmic radiation, nuclear weapons tests or reactor accidents.
The process opens the way for researchers to measure iron-60 abundance in older snow samples to get an idea of where and when the supernova occurred and when our Solar System entered the local interstellar cloud.
The final line of this sciku is a reference to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, in a scene near the very start of the trilogy where Lord Asriel shows images of Dust taken in the Arctic:
“And the streams of Dust…” ” – Come from the sky, and bathe him in what looks like light.”
Toys have to be versatile – they need to be interesting, fun, tough and safe. Plenty of toys are collector’s items, sold in second-hand stores or passed onto the next generation. Yet some plastic toys may have a hidden danger.
Turner (2018) analysed used plastic toys using x-ray fluorescence spectrometry. Hazardous elements, including lead, barium, bromine, cadmium and selenium, were found to be present in many of the toys. Among the worst offenders were Lego bricks from the 1970s which had high levels of cadmium (particularly the colours red and yellow), reflecting manufacturing processes at the time of production. Happily toy production is a lot safer nowadays.
