Author: Thomas Simmons
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 3.5: Tikhov in Awkward Rhyme
Shallow oceans for the sailing Temperatures benign at best Through the telescope tube’s lens? Venus! She invited tropical whaling Old Tikhov sketched what the probes would find with a quick & chary math He predicted a nursemaid covered in plants Waggish blue stolons on clear flushing lobes Later, people laughed at those precepts…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 3: Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov
The Belarusian used chromatic aberration to decidedly advantage an unfeathering of spectrographs for the surface sobbed ruffles of the mirth with which he would flirt He ascended in a gelatin balloon to watch meteors with his friends from the Sorbonne Sternly clutched by the puffs he was, as the blue-gas-flame sibilated girlishly for buoyancy…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 2: Yuriy Vasilievich Kondratyuk
A dishy dark-pupiled Ukrainian Олександр Гнатович Шаргей His mother married his pater in January and Yuri infiltrated the world that June She taught French in Kiev; a social activist, thus, she was declared insane His great-grandfather had battled Napoleon His father loved physics. Yuri read his books. While fighting on WWI’s Caucasian Front,…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 1: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Scarlet fever infected the man as a boy in Izhevskoye taking most of his hearing / He turned to books & spherical trigonometry Before too long, he had carefully worked out Tsiolkovsky’s Formula – an elegant dynamite whooosh! of math for prosecuting stelae up – Next, he penned more to calculate the…
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Tardigrade Physiology
Here’s where they live:Hot springs / deep sea / shingles on my roof Terrestrial Tardigrades adhere to liverwortsand feel most comfortable with a water film But some have survived in spaceSome have been spilled on the moontossed carelessly in the lunar dust They’re ‘dead’ there of courseBut a well-aimed droplet from a droppermight well reanimate…
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Tardigrade Morphology & Reproduction
Barrell-shaped with stubby legs Their caudal segments are enrichedwith a fourth set of these legseven pudgier than the other six Only a few enjoy pigment-cup eyessince most are eye-less Others are endowed with bristles along the head and bodyfor sensation And the entirety of the bodyperforms respiration The round tube-holein the middle of their facescontains…
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Tardigrade Nomenclature
Some call them water bearson account of their bear-like gait Goeze charmingly called them: Mein kleiner Wasserbär (my little-water-bear) (In profile, Goeze himself resembled a Tardigrade) Today Germans label them – with decidedly less charm:Bärtierchen (little-bear-animal) But it was Spallanzi who christened them: Tardigradum (slow-walker) like teens out for a saunter with their mobile devicesstepping…