Free-Fall Spinning Tunnels

Jump into an evacuated hole drilled straight through a uniform, static Earth-like sphere. Accelerate to 7.9 km/s (or 18 000 m.p.h.) at the center, then decelerate back to zero at the antipodes 42 minutes later! Step out of the hole upside … Continue reading
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Wooster Memorial Park – Now Part of the Old Growth Forest Network

On 20 April 2021 Wooster Memorial Park became part of the Old Growth Forest Network.  The founder and director, Joan Maloof, visited Wooster Memorial Park forest to officially induct the park into the Network. The Wooster Tree Ring Lab cored … Continue reading
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Microbial Structures of the Middle Jurassic (Bajocian) Carmel Formation, Southwest Utah: William Santella’s Senior Independent Study thesis

Editor’s Note: Independent Study (IS) at The College of Wooster is a three-course series required of every student before graduation. Earth Sciences students typically begin in the second semester of their junior years with project identification, literature review, and a … Continue reading
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Wooster Geologists featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education

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
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A new “living fossil” bryozoan with a Wooster connection

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 reading
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Geographic Tongue

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 glossitis slowly move on the … Continue reading
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Mars Sky Crane

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 … Continue reading
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New paper on predatory drill holes in Cambrian/Ordovician brachiopods (northern Estonia and northwest Russia)

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 abstract … Continue reading
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Nightfall

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 primaries are slightly larger and … Continue reading
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Israeli Graduate Student Yael Leshno Afriat summarizes her work in the Middle Jurassic of Israel

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
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