Category Archives: ScotBlogs Contributed

The Senior Independent Study process for Morgan Pedroso Curry (’21) and his creative, enthusiastic advisor Dr. Shelley Judge is the subject of an excellent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week. (The article may be behind a pay &… Continue reading →

Way back in the summer of 2008, my good friend Paul Taylor (the Natural History Museum, London), John Sime (Senior Independent Study student at the time) and I explored the Pierre Shale (Upper Cretaceous) of the Black Hills region in … Continue r… Continue reading →

The improbable email was from a pre-dental math major asking about physics research projects combining math and dentistry, but my reaction was, “Yes — only at Wooster!”. Like animated tattoos, the surface patterns of benign migratory … Continue reading →

At the NASA press conference today, chief engineer Adam Steltzner presented three iconic images of the space age: Armstrong’s photo of Aldrin on the lunar surface, Voyager 1’s photo of Saturn and its rings from above the ecliptic, the Hubble … Co… Continue reading →

Once again I’m proud to be on Olev Vinn’s team with this new article on predatory drill holes in Cambrian and Ordovician brachiopods. Predation in the fossil record is always interesting, especially in the early Paleozoic. Here is the abstr… Continue reading →

NASA’s transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system. I thought of “Nightfall”. The six stars of TCY 7037-89-I orbit each other in three binary pairs, as in the schematic. The pr… Continue reading →

For several years I’ve been in the advising circle of Yael Leshno Afriat, a geology graduate student at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has been working in the gorgeous Middle Jurassic units of northern and southern Israel — rocks &… Continue reading →

Another day on Browns Lake collecting and downloading data. Nick Wiesenberg (Geological Technician) and I had a quiet morning on a slushy/almost ice covered lake. Nick was trolling for diatoms and the like for sampling productivity in the lake. He &#82… Continue reading →

Wooster, Ohio — We can’t let the eventful year of 2020 to pass without some record in this blog of how these difficult times profoundly affected Wooster’s Department of Earth Sciences. Along with the rest of the American educational s… Continue reading →

Wooster’s summer 2019 Sherman-Fairchild group just published, “Disruption and recovery of reaction–diffusion wavefronts interacting with concave, fractal, and soft obstacles”, in Physica A. Working with Fish Yu ’21, Chase Fuller… Continue reading →