Speaking of patents, here are some issued in New Hampshire recently …
(This runs in the Concord Monitor each Monday but it fell through the cracks this week, so here it is.) Recent patents issued to NH inventors and/or companies: DEKA Products, Manchester, N.H., has been assigned a patent (9,713,667) developed by five co-inventors for a...
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A new store in Portsmouth accepts only bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
New Hampshire Tech Hub, a recently started news/event source for the state's tech community, has a story about a tourist shop in downtown Portsmouth that only accepts cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. It's called the Free State Bitcoin Shoppe - and I must say that I love...
read moreIf you have a Stirling engine to test, you can put it in the state hospital laundry room
New Hampshire has found the place it wants to test an intriguing power source known as the Stirling engine: In the laundry room of the state hospital. On Thursday the state asked for companies to bid on its plan for a Stirling engine – a variant of gas-powered engines...
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UNH to study whether pesticides on crop seeds accidentally make weeds worse
From UNH News Service: A researcher with the NH Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of New Hampshire has received a $474,679 grant to determine if pesticide seed treatments inadvertently protect weed seeds in the soil from being attacked by naturally...
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Founder of international math institute in Peterborough (yes, Peterborough) passes away
One of the most surprising connections between New Hampshire and science has to be the fact that the Clay Mathematics Institute, famous for its million-dollar Millennium Prizes to solve 9 deep mathematical problems (one of the original 10 has been solved), has its...
read moreHydro power lines, solar clusters and wind farms – one with 40MW of batteries – line up for Mass. power
The big news in large-scale New England alternative energy is the Massachusetts Clean Energy program, in which utilities were required to procure 1,200 MW of clean energy, including large-scale hydropower, in addition to a separate requirement to obtain 1,600 MW of...
read moreIf George Bailey (“It’s a Wonderful Life”) was in banking today, would he be handling bitcoin?
Fans of bitcoin in New Hampshire can now buy the digital currency the old-fashioned way – by walking into a local bank branch and writing a check. BitQuick, a Chicago-based cash for bitcoin startup, says that people can now buy the cyber-currency from other BitQuick...
read moreThe good stuff is redacted from bids for Mass. Clean Energy RFP
If you're a real New England energy financing wonk, you'll want to pore through the bids for the Massachusetts Clean Energy RFP, to see who submitted - but note that all the good stuff (like money) is redacted. Here it...
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Are any of your home network-connected devices harboring malware? You sure?
Many of you reading this have in the past year or two allowed a spy or a bad guy to settle happily into your home, using it as shelter for unpleasant activities. But unless you’re a lot tech-ier than me, it’s hard to realize this, and harder still to stop it. IoT...
read moreThe Lawnchair Astronomer looks at the Perseids and, of course, the eclipse
Gerry Descoteaux is a New Hampshire astronomy fan I have known for 26 years - although I'm not sure we've ever actually met in person, come to think of it. I was an editor at the Nashua Telegraph when he started writing his monthly Lawnchair Astronomer column in 1990,...
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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.