Category Archives: ScotBlogs Contributed

Long before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and while still a Wooster undergraduate, Arthur Compton realized a third way to demonstrate Earth’s spin (after pendulums and gyroscopes). Compton reported his results in a manuscript submitted to th… Continue reading →

Photograph the sky at the same time each day for a year and Sun will appear to execute a figure-8 path called an analemma, which is often inscribed on Earth globes and can be used as an almanac, as by … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Overcoming decades of enormous physics and engineering challenges, amidst persistent pessimism, skepticism, and criticism, the National Ignition Facility has achieved an historic target energy gain of [latex]Q > 1[/latex], which is a major mileston… Continue reading →

I was so impressed with the post by Professor Greg Wiles about his Fall 2022 Geomorphology class that I decided to highlight the Fall 2022 Paleoecology class as well. It was a great group of students, and we did an … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft has successfully entered and exited a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) about Moon. DRO is a stable and easily accessible orbit requiring a low [latex]\Delta V[/latex] velocity change. In DRO, Earth‘s non-negligible gr… Continue reading →

This is a post outlining some of the work we did in Wooster’s class in Geomorphology. One of the early labs was Browns Lake Bog and the Soil Catena. The landforms in the area are spectacular – here is a … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I stayed up late last night and early this morning to watch the successful uncrewed launch of Artemis 1. In Greek tradition, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo, and the Artemis program hopes to return humans — including the … Continue re… Continue reading →

When Crew 5 rocketed to orbit last week aboard the SpaceX Dragon “Endurance” bound for the International Space Station, I was curious to see their zero-gravity indicator. A tradition SpaceX crews have adopted from Russian cosmonauts, the ze… Continue reading →

The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program, but we do. I just watched live the first kinetic-impact asteroid-redirection test as NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft collided with the asteroid-moon Dimorphos of the asteroid Did… Continue reading →

Richmond, Indiana — Today Nick Wiesenberg (our invaluable geological technician), Brianna Lyman (my excellent Teaching Assistant), and I took the 15 students in the Paleoecology course to the fossiliferous Upper Ordovician of eastern Indiana. It&… Continue reading →