Why do some deciduous trees hold onto their leaves all winter?
As New England prepares to enter its annual leaf-peeping frenzy, a question arises: Why don’t oak trees and beech trees drop their leaves in winter, like all the other deciduous species up here? This is, I recently learned, called “marcescence” and...Come see a movie about the most surprising math in NH history
As promised last week, I’m hosting a talk next Tuesday after a showing of “Counting From Infinity” – here’s my column from the Monitor discussing it: No matter how many bar arguments you’ve been involved in, I’ll bet you’ve never heard...Changes in daylight, changes in temperature – it’s leaf-peeping time!
It’s pretty much de rigueur for New England news outlets to run some sort of “ever wonder why leaves change color each fall?” story each fall. Since this is a blog, I don’t have to write it – I can steal it! There are plenty of places to...Alas, the hemlock wooly adelgid shrugged off the “polar vortex”
There are a lot of insect pests that don’t thrive in New Hampshire because of our cold winters. Our winters are getting less cold, or at least less long, and some of them are sneaking north with dire consequences. One of those is the hemlock wooly adelgid, which...
Coal is rarely used to produce power in N.E. – oil, virtually never
The above clip is taken from the draft Regional System Plan from ISO-New England, the folks who run the six-state power grid. There’s a big conference in Boston today discussing the issue of how to deal with all the changes – mostly the growth of...
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Science Cafe NH
Granite Geek on NH Public RadioAbout Granite Geek
Dave Brooks has written a science/tech column since 1991 - yes, that long - and has written this blog since 2006, keeping an eye on topics of geekish interest in and around New Hampshire, from software to sea level rise, population dynamics to printing (3-D, of course). He moderates monthly Science Cafe NH discussions, beer in hand, and discusses the geek world regularly on New Hampshire Public Radio.
Brooks earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics but got lost on the way to the Ivory Tower and ended up in a newsroom. He has reported for newspapers from Tennessee to New England. Rummage through his bag of awards you'll find oddities like three Best Blog prizes from the New Hampshire Press Association and a Writer of the Year award from the N.H. Farm and Forest Bureau, of all places. He joined the Concord Monitor in 2015.