Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
New England’s small aquifers make wells more vulnerable to erratic rainfall
New Hampshire Bulletin has a story about the effect of the summer drought on wells - the news hook concerns a state program to help pay for new wells - that includes a discussion about an important fact: Due to geology, New England's underground aquifers are...
Small mammals time their breeding according to tree seed availability
UNH Today has an article (here it is) about research into how small woodland mammals that depend on tree seeds for much of their food - shrews, voles, mice - react to the way wild seed crops ("mast") fluctuate wildly from year to year. During years with significant...
Biomanufacturing facility coming to Manchester Millyard
The ReGen Valley Tech Hub recently celebrated the groundbreaking of consortium member Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute’s (ARMI) biomanufacturing facility and workforce training center in Manchester’s Millyard. Located at 150 Dow Street and slated for...
N.H.’s best themed Christmas tree is at the Aviation Museum
Who needs tinsel or strings of popcorn when you've got airsickness bags from airlines around the world for decoration? They think so at the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire, next to the main runway of Manchester-Boston Regional Airport.
Dartmouth College goes all-in with A.I.
Dartmouth, the school where the term "artificial intelligence" was first put forward seven decades ago, is going ahead gung-ho with LLM et al through what it calls an "A.I. Partnership With Anthropic and AWS" (Amazon Web Services). Their announcement (here) says:...
What do you do with a gazillion pounds of contaminated soil?
There are three ways of dealing with soils that have been contaminated by years of people and companies dumping toxin crud underground, the old "out of sight, out of mind" mentality. They are: Clean up the soil (often by baking it) and keep it there, which is...
You know about A.I. slop – well, crypto is finance slop
When the state announced plans recently to launch the first-ever municipal bond backed by bitcoin, the news exposed a big hole in my knowledge base. Bitcoin isn’t the problem; it was the bond part that baffled me. I know about chemical bonds, town-meeting bonds to buy...
Winter has gotten 8 degrees F warmer in Burlington in my lifetime
Winter has warmed a staggering 8 degrees Fahrenheit in Burlington, Vermont, between 1970 and 2025. That's the most of 244 U.S. cities analyzed in a new report from Climate Central, a climate research group. Winters have gotten warmer in 98% of those cities. The effect...
Testing whether mushrooms can clean up PFAS
A Plymouth State grad who lives in Merrimack is running her own test, with state approval, of whether mushrooms can help clean up some of the PFAS around the closed Saint Gobain factory. New Hampshire Bulletin has a story (here it is): "The pilot will focus on one...
How many satellites (including UNH’s) can you fit in one rocket?
The SpaceX rocket carrying a partly-UNH-built cubesat launched successfully Nov. 28. The photo above shows the various satellites crammed inside the rocket. Here's part of a UNH write-up on the satellite: A team of 70 undergraduate students from the University of New...
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