Category Archives: ScotBlogs Contributed

I awoke early this Christmas morning to watch the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. I remember the genesis of the telescope a quarter of a century ago when it was called the Next Generation Space Telescope. (The … Continue read… Continue reading →

In August I received an urgent email from my brother with the title “Fusion”. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) had created a burning plasma — a star on Earth — a major milestone on the long road to controlled nuclear fusion…. Continue reading →

Our Administrative Coordinator Patrice Reeder has assembled another magnificent annual report for our department. Once again the Covid Pandemic made this task all the more complex. The cover shows one of our remote courses during the eventful year. We&… Continue reading →

Wooster, Ohio — The Department of Earth Sciences again is pleased to announce that Petroleum Experts Ltd. recently donated ten licenses of their MOVE suite software package to be used for educational and training purposes.  This marks the fourth year &… Continue reading →

This is a different kind of post! This semester I stumbled into an enormous collection of phony research papers published in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences. I became fascinated with the brazen nature of this fraud, and its large scale. … Cont… Continue reading →

Launched just last month, Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter’s trojan asteroids, rocky swarms that orbit about 60 degrees ahead and behind Jupiter in its orbit. Hal Levinson, Lucy’s Principal Investigator, has described Lucy… Continue reading →

I’m pleased to announce the publication of an article describing how fossils can be preserved within carbonate ooids, and what the implications are for this new aspect of taphonomy (the study of fossil preservation) we call ooimmuration. The team… Continue reading →

It is inspiring to see two Wooster Geologists in the news today for national honors! Professor Shelley Judge has been named as this year’s NCAA Div. III Faculty Athletics Representative of the Year by the Faculty Athletics Representatives Association. … Continue reading →

In four dimensions, you can’t tie your shoelaces, because 4D knots don’t work. Any 1D curve in 4D space can be continuously deformed to the unit circle, which is an unknot. The animation below demonstrates how to undo a trefoil knot …… Continue reading →

She’s not looking up at the sky; she’s looking down at it. I am excitedly following the Inspiration4 spaceflight and its crew of four enthusiastic and diverse private citizens: Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Christopher Sembroski, and Si… Continue reading →