Tall buildings made with wood help loggers and the climate
Tackling the biggest problems of the world today and in the future could benefit from technologies of the past. “This is back to the future,” is how Joe Short, vice president of Northern Forest Center, put it at the start of a conference Friday discussing mass timber,...
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Maine would be great for a spaceport, Part II (with tech startup addition)
Last November I had an item about vague thoughts of creating an orbital small launching facility at closed air bases in northern Maine, using small rockets to launch cubesats. As I said at the time, "More like Wallops Island, Virginia, than Cape Canaveral." That idea...
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N.H. data-visualization geeks, celebrate
Do you like data? Do you like data about demographics and economics and other topics that shape how the world works? Of course you do, Granite Geek fan. So UNH Carsey School of Public Policy has a treat for you: They've taken "What is New Hampshire?", a chart-filled...
read moreMake popcorn, fire up YouTube, learn about electric car infrastructure
The September Science Cafe NH in Concord talked about the state's options for expanding electric vehicles via charging and other options. It lasted two hours and, as Science Cafe is wont to do, the conversation covered lots of topics from battery chemistry to signage....
read moreGoats vs. invasive weeds, an update
There are a ton of really horrible invasive weeds out there, but Japanese knotweed might be the horriblest. In the UK it has gotten so bad that you have trouble getting a mortgage if the plant is found within seven meters of your property line, partly because its...
read moreNative Americas didn’t make stone buildings but that doesn’t mean they weren’t here
New Hampshire covers about 6 million acres and people were living and traveling all over it for at least 12,000 years before Europeans arrived. But those pre-Contact people didn’t leave much evidence for us to see. The Granite State doesn’t have a stonehenge or huge...
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Lyme disease podcast listening guide
Podcasts can be a terrific source of long-form journalism, but if you don't have a long commute and don't want to sit in the living room and listen to the radio the way people did in the 1930's before TV, podcasts can be too long. That might be a problem with the...
read moreNH researchers are frozen into Arctic ice, but only just
Some researchers from Dartmouth are among the many scientists participating in a research project that involves a ship getting frozen into the Arctic ice for a year. That's not an original idea - the great polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen did it 120 years ago - but this...
read more‘Cap and trade’ for transportation – think RGGI for cars
New Hampshire is one of a number of states working on developing a regional cap-and-trade program - although "cap-and-invest" is the new term - for transportation. It would work sort of like RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that has helped reduce our...
read moreThe Lyme vaccine that isn’t and one that might be
For obvious reasons there is growing interest in a Lyme vaccine and growing questions about why dogs have one but people don't. The issue was covered in the NHPR podcast Patient Zero - which includes an awesome takedown of a quackish chiropractic laser treatment for...
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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.