NH BioMade awards are important but that doesn’t mean I understand them
New Hampshire is working to develop a biotech industry, focusing on medical technology, especially the design and manufacture of materials that can replace bits of our bodies - skin, bone, muscle. Its focus is the New Hampshire Center for Multiscale Modeling and...
Patents in N.H. through Sept. 27
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Sept. 20 to Sept. 27. *** Centripetal Networks Assigned Patent for Methods, Systems for Protecting Secured Network Centripetal Networks, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, has been assigned a...
COVID tracker: It’s so tempting to fixate on those outliers
When you’re looking at a whole bunch of numbers, as the Monitor does every week while tracking the status of COVID-19 in the state, it’s tempting to focus on the outliers. An example came last Thursday when the number of new hospitalizations, a data point that was...
Heating buildings & driving around are the greenhouse gas demons in Concord
Everybody talks about cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions but it's hard to say you've cut them unless you know what you're emitting in the first place. That's the thinking behind a just-released Greenhouse Gas Inventory for the city of Concord, which has set 100%...
Ranked-choice voting for presidential race is OK for Maine
UPDATE THE NEXT DAY: make that "probably used" - Maine’s high court to reconsider ruling allowing ranked-choice voting in presidential race (story here). "Ranked-choice voting will be used in the presidential election in Maine this fall after the state’s high court...
N.H. has its own source for a ‘feral swine bomb’
Anybody who has raised pigs or visited a pig farm knows that while this animal is smart and cute, they can be destructive and mean and dangerous as all get-out. Wild pigs are even more so, which is why their continued spread in the U.S. and Canada is one of the more...
French fries – bad for you, good for Keene State heating
My first job in high school was at a fast-food joint that made fried chicken. As low man on the totem pole I had to clean out the grease trap, a container under the floor where used fats and oils collected during the course of the day. Almost five decades later, the...
Solar dominates Maine’s big renewables push
From Greentech Media (whole story is here): Solar will account for about 482 megawatts of the 546 megawatts of projects approved Tuesday by the Maine Public Utilities Commission. Maine now has about 90 megawatts of solar installed, putting it in the bottom ten states...
As cases keep rising, our COVID tracker adds another metric
With small clusters of COVID-19 popping up at schools and perhaps elsewhere, including the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, New Hampshire’s pandemic situation remains, shall we say, unsettled. But nothing worse than that – at least, not so far. The average number of new...
Some 20,000 N.H. households haven’t responded to the Census yet
With less than two weeks left in the official deadline to complete the 2020 Census, there has been no response from people in about 4.5% of households in New Hampshire – roughly 20,000 houses, apartments, short-term housing units, group facilities and condos. About...
Return to the Concord Monitor
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.