Mountaintop triangulation to map N.H. (redux)
Last week my wife and I hiked up the back side of the Mt. Sunapee range - I'm waiting until there's real snow in the Whites to drive that far - and were surprised to find a fancy cairn on the ridge, shown above. It was a couple miles south of the ski area, maybe a...
New Hampshire’s all-time patent leader is no surprise
A commercial real-estate firm called CommercialCafe crunched data on patents from 1975 through 2015 and did some state-by-state comparisons - probably because it knows media outlets (who, me?) can't resist such lists. You will not be surprised to hear that the New...
What about that C-130 fuselage that crawled through Concord?
Last week the 55,000-pound, 50-foot-long fuselage of a C-130 cargo plane was hauled through Concord for reasons that are still a little mysterious, and since then I've been writing about it almost every day, much to the interest of readers. I've been besieged with...
Makerspace’s shortage of needle-and-thread skills thwarts mask that allows people to read lips
Makeit Labs, the state's oldest and biggest makerspace (pre-COVID anyway - who knows what size anything is, these days?) has designed and made a pandemic-suitable face mask with a transparent section so that deaf people can still read your lips. The story from...
Ranked-choice voting worked for NH Democrats
New Hampshire's Democrats had a lousy election this year at the state level - every branch of state government is now controlled by Republicans, although the Democrats did hold onto all the federal seats. To compensate, they had some fun when they met to vote for...
Maine proposes a floating wind farm
A dozen wind turbines floating 20 miles off the coast of Maine are being proposed by that state, which is looking to have a stake in what is going to be a huge offshore wind industry. "The primary purpose of the project would be research, with a goal of working with...
Mathematical models, health decisions will guide vaccine distribution
No matter how good COVID-19 vaccines are, there isn't going to be enough made to treat everybody for at least a year. That leads to the question: Who gets which doses and when? Undark Magazine has an article about mathematical modeling that is helping to guide...
N.H. residents still sought for Astra Zeneca’s COVID vaccine trial
This story is from last week's blog. I'm rerunning it because their still looking for trial subjects. Since it ran this virus has been in the news because AstraZeneca said it was doing really well in early trials overseas, then faced concern about how they were...
N.H. patents through Nov. 22
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Nov. 15 to Nov. 22*** Parallel Wireless Assigned Patent for IuGW Architecture Parallel Wireless, Nashua, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent (No. 10,841,969, initially filed April...
Space Force comes to a New Hampshire town with a weird history of trying to overcome gravity
I am happy to say that the Space Force has come to New Hampshire, although not in the form that rocket fans might have hoped. Alas, they are not going to build a spaceport at Pease. You’ll have to continue going to Odiorne State Park to watch orbit-bound vehicles go...
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Science Cafe NHAbout 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 WKXL radio in Concord.
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.