ScotBlogs

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 →

I’m pleased to announce another paper has appeared from our ongoing Estonian-German-American collaboration on symbiosis in the fossil record. The beautiful specimen above is the trepostome bryozoan Esthoniopora subsphaerica growing around a bioclaustration, forming a distinctive tube (Katian, Rakvere, northern … Continue reading →

On 1852 October 23, Francis Guthrie noticed that he needed only 4 colors to color the counties of England so no two bordering counties shared the same color. This works for any map, but only in 1976, and with the aid of … Continue reading →

Long before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and while still a Wooster undergraduate, Arthur Compton realized a third way to demonstrate Earth’s spin (after pendulums and gyroscopes). Compton reported his results in a manuscript submitted to the journal … Continue reading →

Photograph the sky at the same time each day for a year and Sun will appear to execute a figure-8 path called an analemma, which is often inscribed on Earth globes and can be used as an almanac, as by … Continue reading →

Overcoming decades of enormous physics and engineering challenges, amidst persistent pessimism, skepticism, and criticism, the National Ignition Facility has achieved an historic target energy gain of [latex]Q > 1[/latex], which is a major milestone for controlled nuclear fusion. Last week, NIF … Continue reading →

I was so impressed with the post by Professor Greg Wiles about his Fall 2022 Geomorphology class that I decided to highlight the Fall 2022 Paleoecology class as well. It was a great group of students, and we did an … Continue reading →

The Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft has successfully entered and exited a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) about Moon. DRO is a stable and easily accessible orbit requiring a low [latex]\Delta V[/latex] velocity change. In DRO, Earth‘s non-negligible gravity contributes to a 3-body problem, and … Continue reading →

This is a post outlining some of the work we did in Wooster’s class in Geomorphology. One of the early labs was Browns Lake Bog and the Soil Catena. The landforms in the area are spectacular – here is a … Continue reading →