ScotBlogs

Back in 2018, some internal sophomore research funding through the College of Wooster allowed me to hire Anna Cooke (’20) to begin an investigation into rain-on-snow events in Alaska. Rain-on-snow is exactly what it sounds like: rain falling on top of … Continue reading →

In 1945, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke published “Extra-Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” in Wireless World magazine. Clarke calculated a special orbit, about 36 000 km above the equator with a period of one … Continue reading →

Last weekend, I attended a conference in Germany. I used the opportunity during my sabbatical to return to this conference series, which I attended the last time in 2002. The conference takes place in a small village in the Harz, … Continue reading →

My friend Paul Taylor and I are junior authors on a paper that has just appeared in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (“G-Cubed”) as an in press accepted manuscript. We’ll be the first to admit that it is a bit … Continue reading →

Greetings from McMurdo once again! After many delays and a lot of worry about whether we’d have time to complete our science goals, we have returned with lots of great data and plans for future work. If the weather holds, … Continue reading →

At my computer Tuesday evening, I receive a message from a university physics chat that is both thrilling and chilling: LIGO and Virgo report a “burst” gravitational wave event, possibly due to a core-collapse supernova (or a binary collision where … Continue reading →

Like several towns and cities in the midwest and northeast USA, Wooster, OH broke its daily high temperature record for January 11 last Saturday. Below is a graph of some of the data (made a little prettier in powerpoint) from … Continue reading →

I remember looking at a classroom map of Earth and thinking the continents seem like puzzle pieces, especially north and south America in the west and Europe and Africa in the east. I mentally fit them together. Later I learned … Continue reading →

Hello to you all from… still McMurdo. While we’re all frustrated to still be playing the waiting game, a ray of hope appeared last night – a plane flew from McMurdo to WAIS Divide, for the first time in over … Continue reading →

For many years I’ve offered a First-Year Seminar at Wooster entitled, “Nonsense! (And Why It’s So Popular)”. Today we finished the latest version of the course. The semester went so well I want to celebrate. The class of first-year students … Continue reading →