Ode to a Battery, a respectful nod to Keats' Bright Star

Bright cell, if I be only as charged as you!

U can shine in the middle of the night

AA, AAA, C and D, eternal battery, do not part, baby.

You are an electric bouquet

Bringing to life toys 'n Ex-citation

Some thinks a battery is like a Hermite, 

Shuttered in a dark, springy compartment

Yet u are nature's sleepless moonlit eye

On display

AAA,

How steadfast thou art!

You swell the hearts of young lovers

Sending surgical emojis 

With priestlike diligence

Never questioning the sweet unrest such

Messages may provoke

Always delivering until your Alkaline is

Sapped; your lithium an artefact 

If the Etna is a source of Energy Eternal

Blowing casual smoke rings in the style of 

Lauren Bacall 

You dissuade me not, Dear battery, 

With apparent blandness

You too are a force of nature that makes

Forests vibrate pure energy

You too

Resist the voltage that All wish to consume

Effortlessly, unselfishly

Zapping nervous dendrite endings

Sending those shocks during 

Cardiac arrest

Giving a second chance to All, 

Racists, Bigots, Humanitarians alike 

Yet today you are scoffed on Reddit and X

Given wicked looks 

Accused of overheating and creating fires

Charged for bringing down planes and burning babies

Dear battery

You mustn't stoop to such humiliation that

A "battery sitter" is called for

To oversee your idle rechargeable days 

While blowing smoke rings in the forest

Let your twilight years glow

Knowing an endless flow of eBikers and EVs

Await at your doorstep

Like a pack of hungry wolves

Awaiting one more charge.

Ancient ‘Dune’-like Sandworm Existed Far Longer Than Thought

Researchers examined fossils of the predatory worm and found a new species that persisted for 25 million years after it was believed to have become extinct.

Researchers found fossils of a new species of predatory worm that lived 480 million years ago, part of a group that was thought to have died out at the end of the Cambrian Explosion 25 million years earlier.Credit...Javier Ortega Hernández

By Jack Tamisiea

March 26, 2024

With a head covered in rows of curved spines, ancient Selkirkia worms could easily be confused with the razor-toothed sandworms that inhabit the deserts of Arrakis in “Dune: Part Two.”

During the Cambrian Explosion more than 500 million years ago, these weird worms — which lived inside long, cone-shaped tubes — were some of the most common predators on the seafloor.

“If you were a small invertebrate coming across them, it would have been your worst nightmare,” said Karma Nanglu, a paleontologist at Harvard. “It’s like being engulfed by a conveyor belt of fangs and teeth.”

Thankfully for would-be spice harvesters, these ravenous worms disappeared hundreds of million years ago. But a trove of recently analyzed fossils from Morocco reveals that these formidable predators measuring only an inch or two in length, persisted much longer than previously thought.