ScotBlogs

The conical fossil above on the cover of the latest issue of Palaeoworld is the paratype of Conchicolites parcecostatis, a new Ordovician (Katian) cornulitid species from the Korgesaare Formation, Sutlema quarry, Estonia. It is tiny, only about two millimeters long. … Continue reading →

A chill went through the spaceflight community last week as NASA reported that it had lost contact with the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. Delivered to Mars under the belly of the Perseverance rover and intended as a 5-flight 30-sol tech demo, … Continue reading →

Because of the pandemic, the summer of 2019 was regrettably and unexpectedly my last Wooster summer research program, but the team was amazing. Niklas Manz and I obtained Sherman-Fairchild funding to work with Margaret McGuire ’20, Yang (Fish) Yu ’21, … Continue reading →

I hired Kiyomi from Hawai’i for our NSF REU summer program in spring 2020 amidst fears of the pandemic that eventually postponed the program two years. When she finally arrived in summer 2022, I had already retired from Wooster, where … Continue reading →

When I bought my new house, I knew I would soon need to replace its heat pump, which was almost 20 years old. Earlier this month, with my old pump laboring under a cold snap, I upgraded to a new … Continue reading →

Readers of this blog will remember Kate Runciman, a 2022 graduate of The College of Wooster and now a graduate student at the University of Cambridge. Her Independent Study thesis (after peer review and revisions) has now been published in … Continue reading →

I was very fortunate this semester to have such a fine class of paleoecologists. This course broadly covers the Earth’s ecological history, so it consists of principles, theories and processes illuminated with case studies, all strung along the thread of … Continue reading →

I asked Siri to wake me at 7:15 AM this morning so I could watch SpaceX’s second Integrated Flight Test of Super Heavy Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Unfortunately, my house suffered a rare power outage … Continue reading →

This semester’s Geology of Energy Resources course, which focuses on how fossil fuels form, are extracted, and are used, had the opportunity to visit two unconventional oil and gas wells run by Ascent Resources located in southeastern Ohio this week. … Continue reading →

Today was astonishingly beautiful in Ohio: bright blue skies and the peak of fall leaf colors. By happy circumstance, I had three Polish paleontologist friends visiting Wooster after the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh last week. Greg … Continue reading →