Wood-burning power plant’s waste heat may grow some leafy greens
Burgess BioPower, a wood-burning electricity plant in the North County city of Berlin, has gotten a $500,000 state grant to heat a greenhouse for vegetables with its waste heat. From a press release: The recovered energy will be used to heat a state-of-the-art, $25...
read moreIs there a macro role for microgrids in NH electricity?
Microgrids - large-ish collections of buildings that can power themselves for at least a while independently of the main power grid - are seen as one of the ways that the electric system can cope with the new reality of renewables and distributed energy. New...
read more‘You can teach anything through beer’
The Brewing Science Lab has been a publicity gold mine for UNH. Reporters (including me) can't resist stories about the science of making beer. Here's the latest example: A nice piece in Foster's Daily Democrat, the weirdly-named daily paper of Dover, about the lab's...
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A clever container for a statue of a “father of video games”
Today in Manchester they unveiled a statue of home video game pioneer Ralph Baer, about whom I have written many times. It shows him sitting on a bench playing with the "brown box" that was the first iteration of what eventually became Maganvox Odyssey, the first...
read moreWorld’s most famous Tesla mechanic is in New Hampshire
YouTube is horrible for many things but it's awesome for training videos. My wife and I have used them for everything from very minor car repairs to fixing the sink to learning the Shim-Sham (a lindy hop dance - which we're still trying to learn). These repair videos...
read moreN.H. may outlaw phone-number spoofing
Scammers and some telemarketers change Caller ID information to get past your defenses. That may soon draw a $5,000 civil penalty in New Hampshire - although good luck finding the real perpetrators, especially if they're overseas. Here's my story today in the Monitor:...
read moreHalf-empty Manchester airport is trying to rebound
When I moved to New Hampshire, Manchester airport (they hadn't added the "Boston" name) was still in the old terminal. You'd walk out to the planes, and park on the street. They'd put envelopes under the windshield wipers and ask you to mail in $3 (I think it was) per...
read moreMore science talks amid beer
There are two ways to approach holding science talks in a bar or restaurant - programs that have names like Science Cafe or Science by the Pint or Science on Tap. One is to invited local scientists to talk about their research. That's the route frequently taken by...
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Talking about research on Mars (well – Utah)
Erika Rydberg, a 3D printing expert with the interesting job title of Digital Creation Technologist at Plymouth State University, spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, where people go to simulate life on Mars (except for the gravity) to help...
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You can either listen to me or you can listen to me
You can listen to me talk about the collapse of recycling with Chris Ryan on Concord's WKXL radio (here) or you can listen to me talk to the Monitor's Steve Leone on our Granite Geek podcast (here). Or I suppose you could listen to one with your left and the other...
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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.