Category Archives: ScotBlogs Contributed

Alaska Collaboration, Ongoing and Future Projects

In addition to the summer work described by Lilly Hinkley and Tyrell Cooper, the Wooster Tree Ring Lab is collaborating projects with (1) The Tree Ring Lab of the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany. This work is part of a … Continue … Continue reading

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Coring Trees and Flying over Seas, Hoonah, Alaska 2023

Guest Bloggers: Lilly Hinkley and Tyrell Cooper Tyrell, Lilly, Nick and Dr. Wiles of Wooster’s Tree Ring Lab (WTRL) were in Juneau and Hoonah, Alaska working in collaboration with the Alaskan Youth Stewards (AYS) in order to extend our tree &#823… Continue reading

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Aquatic siliceous microbiota team excelling with summer research at The College of Wooster

I am honored to be working with a great research team this summer in Scovel Hall at The College of Wooster. Our topic has been the analysis of the siliceous sponges and diatoms in a sediment core from Brown’s Lake … Continue reading → Continue reading

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The Ringed Planets

When I was a kid, Saturn was the ringed planet. But today, we know that all of the outer planets have rings. The James Webb Space Telescope has now imaged each of them in infrared revealing their distinctive structures, including … Continue readi… Continue reading

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Simplest Chaos

The motion of one of the simplest dynamical systems, a torqued, damped, nonlinear pendulum, can be infinitely complicated. Consider a simple pendulum of length [latex]l[/latex] and mass [latex]m[/latex] rigidly connected to an axle of radius [latex]r[/… Continue reading

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Another new paper: A nestling brachiopod in an Ordovician boring and its implications

I know, I know, several new papers lately. This spike in publications is a function of two things: The pandemic with its enforced isolation meant my colleagues and I had more time to finish manuscripts, and I belong to some … Continue reading &#8… Continue reading

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The Ordovician bioclaustration revolution: A new paper

Bioclaustration is the process by which an organism is embedded within the growing skeleton of another. Bioclaustrations are fascinating in the fossil record because they give direct information about how two or more organisms lived together in the anc… Continue reading

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Vampire Ein Stein

Just a couple of months after announcing the remarkable discovery of a single shape that forces a non periodic tiling of the plane, Smith, Myers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss have announced an improved aperiodic monotile or ein stein. (Ein stein is &#82… Continue reading

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A new paper on brachiopod symbiosis in the Early Paleozoic

My Estonian colleague and friend Olev Vinn and I have been working for many years on examples of parasitism recorded in the fossil record. For the last couple of years we have been summarizing the data and assessing paleoecological and … Continue… Continue reading

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The Temperature of the Vacuum

Quantum field theory predicts that the temperature of empty space should depend on the observer’s motion, increasing proportionally with acceleration. Here I attempt an accessible introduction to this striking effect, related to Hawking radiation… Continue reading

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