ScotBlogs

After half a century confined to low-Earth orbit, humans once again intend to leave Earth and voyage to Moon, currently planned for late next year. The reality of this exciting adventure crystallized earlier this month when NASA announced the diverse … Continue reading →

The College of Wooster has a required Independent Study system for all students, and it is a marvelous program. Each student, usually in the spring semester of their junior year, signs up for the Junior Independent Study course. It is … Continue reading →

This academic year has been thrilling: first nuclear fusion breakeven, now an ein Stein! Last week, a preprint at arxiv.org by David Smith et al. announced an “ein Stein”, or one stone, a shape that forces a non periodic tiling … Continue reading →

The Fossil of the Week series is no longer weekly, and the gnarly specimen above is not actually a fossil, but the brand is so embedded in this blog that I’m still using it for occasional contributions. Like the specimen … Continue reading →

The forces between two electric charges in arbitrary motion are complicated by velocity, acceleration, and time-delay effects. The forces need not even lie along the line joining the two charges! Suppose a source charge [latex]q^\prime[/latex] is at position [latex]\vec r^{\,\prime}[/latex] … Continue reading →

The Fossil of the Week series is no longer weekly, and the beautiful specimen above is not actually a fossil, but the brand is so embedded in this blog that I’m going to use it! My friend Al Curran, an … Continue reading →

Three Wooster physics alumni who all work at Kent Displays, Inc. returned to campus last Thursday to share some info about the physics of liquid crystals as well as some of their personal journeys to Wooster and beyond. See more … Continue reading →

I am delighted to announce that a new paper has appeared in the journal Lethaia on Middle Jurassic paleoecology in southern Israel. The senior author is Yael Leshno Afriat, and it was part of her PhD dissertation at Hebrew University … Continue reading →

Olev Vinn, Andrej Ernst, and I have been working for years on various case studies of symbiotic endobionts (organisms that live within the skeletons of others) in the fossil record. This week our data-rich review paper has been published in … Continue reading →

Since the mid 1960s, all space walks or extra-vehicular activities (EVAs) have involved just one or two astronauts — except once. In May 1992, on the STS-49 mission, the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour was attempting to rescue a stranded communications … Continue reading →