Horgan Seminar Blog

How ‘history’ disregards Earth’s cataclysms and its affect on past, present, and future humans. By Gianangelo Dichio Imagine a flood 1000 feet tall and flowing at 100 miles per hour! This was one of the Missoula floods that ended the last ice age 14,600 years ago during what was called  Meltwater Pulse 1A   (MWP 1A) .  Note:  A  meltwater pulse  is an increase of glacial meltwater entering the oceans during deglaciation. Also  kya  stands for  thousand years ago  (read on). In the 500 years after MWP 1A, sea levels rose by an estimated  18 meters  , sending the Earth into the last stage of the  Pleistocene  (1.8  million ya -1.7 kya ) , the  Younger Dryas  ( 12.9-11.7 kya ) , and eventually into the  Holocene  ( 11.7 kya — present ) , the interglacial period that we currently live in. The Younger Dryas was the period of time after the 10–15ºC increase in temperature that caused MWP 1A whe...

  Aidan Minnihan Professor John Horgan 5 May 2023 Social Media: RUINING OUR LIVES?!?!?! For better or for worse, the Internet has become an irreplaceable, inescapable part of our lives. We use it to stay in contact with friends and family; to apply for jobs; to work with coworkers remotely; the list goes on and on seemingly without end. Of course, none of this would be possible without the various social media platforms that exist. Social media has utterly revolutionized the way that we go about our daily lives, and it’s nearly impossible to thrive in our society without at least an email and LinkedIn profile. This necessary attachment to social media has certainly not come without many drawbacks, however, and our reliance on it has done much to contribute to the mental health crisis that we face today. First and foremost, it’s important to note that even separate from its necessity in everyday life, part of what makes social media such an omnipresent problem is that it is high...

 Krishant Putrevu Han Solo pulls back a lever and the stars around the Millenium Falcon bend and curve as the ship leaps to the other side of the galaxy in a matter of seconds. The Doctor flips a few switches and the TARDIS flies through a multicolored vortex pushing past the boundaries of time and space like a car speeding down a highway. Audiences watched in awe as the 20 th century brought people’s wildest dreams to the pages of books and the screens of televisions and theaters. Science fiction has been an ingrained part of cultural representation, embodying the parts of science that people dream of achieving. And with the United States placing people on the moon in 1969, people began to look further than the stars. Wormholes began cementing themselves into the public consciousness as a staple of science fiction.             In December of 2022 however, people woke up to almost every popular science publication from Quant...