Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Can a less large – but still large – turbine make “small wind” a thing?
A Massachusetts start-up is trying to develop a wind turbine sized between the backyard ones that are mostly a flop and the huge ones that are great at generation but unpopular with neighbors. EnergyNews story is here. A New England startup is betting its small...
Very first New Englanders might have spotted a woolly mammoth or two
In fossil-deprived Northern New England, where geology melted dinosaur remains and glaciers ground up everything else, woolly mammoths are special. (Addendum: They're so special that a project at Harvard called Revive & Restore is trying to use genetics to revive...
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Fusion power is coming!
The Boston Globe has an update on Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff that is working on a fusion reactor. It's going to build a manufacturing facility in Devens, Mass. and says it has "developed highly sophisticated electromagnets that can confine the plasma...
It’s windier than normal … or is it? (redux)
It's very windy today in New Hampshire - lots of power lines down but not the ones to my house, thankfully. I've posted a couple items about wind speeds at Concord Municipal Airport, the National Weather Service's official measuring spot, in response to reader...
Building a better ‘canary trap’
Most of us have heard of computer network "honey traps" to lure in bad guys, but "canary traps" are new to me: "The canary trap technique in espionage spreads multiple versions of false documents to conceal a secret." At Dartmouth, cybersecurity folks are using AI to...
Grow kelp and sink it. Can that help the climate?
"Maine Startup Aims To Pull Carbon Out Of The Atmosphere By Growing — And Then Sinking — Kelp Farms" I think that headline says it all - lots of details in the story from WBUR right here, notably the fact that the idea is to grow kelp on buoys out in the deep ocean;...
Mars rover will be looking at the product of a tiny N.H. company pretty much every day
here’s a high-tech bit of New Hampshire on the Perseverance rover that NASA just landed on Mars, but to be perfectly honest, it doesn’t look very high-techish. “You see that disk? We made all the white stuff,” said Art Springsteen, who with his wife, Kathryn, is...
It’s a barn-raising but with solar panels
New Hampshire has long been a laggard when it comes to solar power. Maybe we need some banjos. “We’ve had fiddlers and guitar players at one of the raisers,” said Chris Kolb, president of a volunteer group called HAREI that installed 15 rooftop solar arrays atop homes...
A ‘vertiport’ not a heliport for Manchester
New Hampshire is falling farther behind on electric vehicles and can't do anything new with passenger trains and has a so-so-at-best intercity bus system - but hey, let's talk about cargo-carrying VTOL drones, autonomous to some extent. (Definitely not helicopters)....
N.H. coal-fired power plant wins another year of support
The coal-fired power plant in Bow has won another year’s funding from a program designed to guarantee future electricity supplies. The two units at Merrimack Station, soon to be the last coal-fired plant in New England, will be paid about $1.08 million per month from...
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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.