Energy Archives - The Sciku Project

June 22, 2023May 16, 2024

Air-Gen-Ku by James Penha

tension from thin air
moisture poring dynamo
teensy as thin hair
by James Penha

Scientists have invented a tiny (I mean tiny!) generator that processes our air’s humidity through nanopores so as to create, in effect, a perfectly clean battery that continuously produces electricity. The news knocked me out; I had to knock out a sciku.

Further reading
‘Scientists find way to make energy from air using nearly any material’, 2023, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/05/26/harvest-energy-thin-air/

‘Generic Air-Gen Effect in Nanoporous Materials for Sustainable Energy Harvesting from Air Humidity’, 2023, X. Liu, H. Gao, L. Sun & J. Yao, Advanced Materials, https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202300748

Author Bio
Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits TheNewVerse.News, an online journal of current-events poetry. You can find out more about James’ poetry on his website https://jamespenha.com and catch up with him on Twitter @JamesPenha

Enjoyed James’ sciku? Check out more of his sciku here: ‘Quantumku‘, ‘DNAncient’, ‘If a Tree Talks in a Forest’, and ‘Boys Whale Be Boys’.

March 30, 2023June 20, 2024

Dancing by John Hawkhead

photons
E=mc²
dancing
By John Hawkhead

Photons are some of the most fascinating particles in the physical sciences; fundamental particles of light that are the smallest possible packets of electromagnetic energy.

Albert Einstein’s mass–energy equivalence (represented by the formula E = mc²) gives the basic relation between mass and energy, stating that under appropriate situations mass and energy are interchangeable and the same. Yet photons have a rest mass of zero – they are massless particles – therefore should they even have any energy at all? And if they have neither mass nor energy then would they even physically exist?

E = mc² is actually a special case of the more general equation E² = p²c² + m²c⁴, where E is energy, p is momentum, c is the speed of light and m is mass at rest. Since photons have no mass, this equation becomes E = pc. Effectively, photons get their energy from their momentum and can never be at rest, constantly moving.

How they move has been the subject of study for decades, with recent research suggesting that photons can behave as both particles and waves (to find out more, check out the sciku ‘Spooky Interaction’, also by John Hawkhead).

This sciku plays around with the concepts of photons, square dancing and the randomness of measuring the path of photons.

Further reading:

‘Light has no mass so it also has no energy according to Einstein, but how can sunlight warm the earth without energy?’, Science Questions with Surprising Answers: https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2014/04/01/light-has-no-mass-so-it-also-has-no-energy-according-to-einstein-but-how-can-sunlight-warm-the-earth-without-energy/

‘Mass–energy equivalence’, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence

‘Does light have mass?’, Physics FAQ: https://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/Relativity/SR/light_mass.html

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@HawkheadJohn) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/). Read more of John’s sciku here!

‘Dancing’ was previously published in Failed Haiku 74 (1 Feb 2022).

November 18, 2022January 13, 2023

Environmental Charlie Browns by Jerome Berglund

children’s ambitious
chalk drawings smudged by elements
December morning
By Jerome Berglund

After Democrats, during campaigning, vocally aligning themselves with Green New Deal initiatives, the imperatives of climate science and crucial regulatory, environmental and energy reforms, Joe Biden’s energy policy has been supportive of fracking, retains $20 billion in annual subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, continues to focus on expansion of nuclear infrastructure that (beyond being potentially catastrophic) are as much as three times as costly as wind or solar alternatives.

Progressive supporters begin to feel increasingly like betrayed Charlie Browns, as one supposedly leftist representative after another double-crosses their constituents, reneges on clear promises and continues supporting the very detrimental agendas and structures they purported their stances on were the meaningful thing which separated them from science-denying or ignoring conservative opponents.

The most perfunctory analysis of who is buttering bread of politicians on both sides of the aisle gives a telling indication of which interests they are representing, and what their terms of office’s legacies in policy will look like.

Further reading: Biden’s climate agenda stalls, and progressives fume

Author bio:

Jerome Berglund, recently nominated for the 2022 Touchstone awards, graduated from USC’s film program, worked in the entertainment industry before returning to the midwest where he has been employed as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Jerome has exhibited many haiku, senryu and haiga online and in print, most recently in the Asahi Shimbun, Bear Creek Haiku, Bamboo Hut, Cold Moon Journal, Daily Haiga, Failed Haiku, Haiku Dialogue, Scarlet Dragonfly, Under the Basho, and the Zen Space. You can follow him on Twitter @BerglundJerome and find more of his poetry here: https://flowersunmedia.wixsite.com/jbphotography/post/haiku-senryu-and-haiga-publications

Check out Jerome’s other sciku here: ‘Illusion‘, ‘Civil Disobedience’, ‘Vested Interests‘ and ‘Exploitation in Micro and Macro’.

April 14, 2022April 13, 2022

A Sciku for Rayner Explainer by Dr Michael J. Leach

the best science show
at the Fringe—sound & light waves
illuminate minds
by Dr Michael J. Leach

This sciku is a tribute to science communicator Rayner Explainer’s show A Flying Photon.

This show about the all-important photon—an elementary particle of light—has received excellent reviews, including but not limited to ones in InDaily, On The Record UniSA, and The AU Review.

Following sold-out shows at the Adelaide Fringe 2022, A Flying Photon won the Science at the Fringe Award presented by Inspiring SA. You can read more about the show’s topic in Rachel Rayner’s poem ‘Photonics’, which appeared in the debut issue of Consilience.

Check out more sciku by Michael, including ‘The Burden of Bushfire Smoke‘, ‘The Core Correlate of COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance‘, ‘Drug-Induced Hip Fractures‘, ‘The Psychopharmacological Revolution‘, ‘Quality of Life at Seven Years Post-Stroke‘, ‘The Early Impacts of COVID-19 on Australian General Practice‘, and ‘Australian Science Poetry‘ with science communicator Rachel Rayner. Michael also has another Covid-19-related sciku published in Pulse which is well worth checking out: ‘flu shot announcement‘.

December 16, 2021December 10, 2021

An Evening in the Lab by Dr Bhavin Siritanaratkul

In mid-2021 The Sciku Project teamed up with the Literature and Science Hub at 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

February 5, 2021February 5, 2021

Entropy by Robert Erlandson

The second law of thermodynamics is a fundamental law of nature. One expression of this law states that the level of disorder in the universe is steadily increasing. Entropy is a measure of the system’s disorder, higher entropy means more disorder.

The image above is known as a ‘haiga’ – a coupling of poetry and imagery, the idea being to create a third art form that is greater than the sum of its parts. Below is an alternate version of the poem that takes the same starting point to create a tanka.

Dark Matter by John Hawkhead

dark matter theory
how strange particles appear
as they disappear
By John Hawkhead

Dark matter is a term used to describe the effect on the movement of stars by what scientists hypothesise to be matter. However, dark matter does not emit light or energy, and so is ‘invisible’. To hold the elements of the universe together, dark matter must make up approximately 80-85% percent of the universe.

Many scientists think dark matter is made up of particles known as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS) or another type of particle the neutrino. The quantum world allows for the existence of virtual particles that can appear and disappear in zero point energy conditions.

Further reading: An Introduction to Dark Matter

Read more of John’s sciku here!

April 18, 2019April 18, 2019

Carbon negative

Save planet and lives –
carbon negative power.
Economic too.

Whilst parts of the world move slowly towards carbon-neutral energy sources, others lag behind, heavily reliant on coal power stations and other power sources that release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and have negative impacts upon air quality. Yet increasingly it seems that carbon-neutral isn’t enough: in order to limit global temperature increases carbon-negative technologies are required.

One route for carbon-negative power generation is to convert biomass into energy and then capture and store the waste carbon dioxide. By removing the carbon in the biomass from the environment this is a carbon-negative process. Yet currently this isn’t efficient and requires too much land to grow the plants, land that is then unavailable for much needed food production.

Research by Lu et al (2019) has used China as a case study to address this issue since China is heavily dependent on coal power stations. Instead of relying exclusively on biomass, the researchers propose using a combination of biomass and coal to develop a pure source of hydrogen fuel. They found that a minimum of 35% biomass could result in carbon-negative power generation. Not only that but the biomass used in the process could be plant material leftover after harvesting, plant material which is currently burnt in the fields and is a major source of air pollution. What’s more the researchers suggest that the process would be as cost effective, and thus competitive, with the current coal fired power stations.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1812239116