Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
That boom was (probably) a meteor, but why do meteors boom?
That boom which rattled southern N.H. and surrounding areas late Sunday morning now seems very likely to have been a meteor exploding, probably just a few tens of miles up. You may have seen the above picture from the GOES-16 satellite Geostationary Lightning Mapper,...
Building body parts – can the state keep its lead?
Inventors who go on to build companies know that "first-mover advantage" can disappear in a heartbeat. Dean Kamen, who is best known nationally for the Segway fizzle but better known hereabouts for creating and lead DEKA, the R&D firm, and in the process...
In a Manchester park, a little piece of planet-wide species extinction
In the most unlikely of places – a hilly park overlooking downtown Manchester with as much broken glass and graffiti as trees and boulders – a small part of the world’s ecological crisis is about to play out. If studies of samples from Mexico confirm what is...
“Institute for Cellular Agriculture” is thinking big by thinking small
Is lab-grown meat or similar foodstuff ever going to be a significant part of humanity's diet? Maybe. Down the road near Boston, Tufts University is thinking about it. Tufts has been awarded $10 million over five years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's...
Looking at 13 millennia (and counting) of New Hampshire’s original residents
When you’re an archaeologist, you know that there are rocks and then there are rocks. In his new book, Robert Goodby, a professor of anthropology at Franklin Pierce University, talks about a few that his team uncovered in 2009. “We were in this quiet pine forest, dead...
Data crunchers say N.H. drivers are the best drivers in the country. Honest.
At least, that’s the conclusion you’ll reach if you mash together one company’s data about accidents, speeding tickets, DUIs and citations this year, put the result into a spreadsheet program and order it by states. New Hampshire comes out on top. This was done as a...
N.H. patents through Oct. 10
By Targeted News Service The following federal patents were awarded in New Hampshire from Oct. 3 through Oct. 10 . ***Magic Leap Assigned Patent for Multi-Depth Plane Display System with Reduced Switching Between Depth PlanesMagic Leap, Plantation, Florida, has been...
Are leaves changing early? Answer: 0.6
(This column ran in September 2020; time to recycle it!) It’s that time of year again, when everybody says, “The leaves are changing earlier than usual!” This year the supposed culprit behind early leaf-peeping is the drought, which continues to be very serious...
NFTs are a hot (if weird) investment, so why couldn’t New Hampshire sell them?
How much are online bragging rights to “Live Free or Die” worth? A billion dollars? Matthew St. Onge thinks that’s as good a guess as any, and he’d like New Hampshire to have a piece of it. Plus he wouldn’t mind a little bit for himself. The Concord resident has...
Forget Segway or standing wheelchairs: Kamen’s DEKA is working on a sentry robot
The Union-Leader points out that DEKA, the research-and-development firm headed by Dean Kamen in Manchester's Millyard, is working on an autonomous "sentry bot". They took it for a carefully controlled outing at a fund-raising footrace. "They were seeing what kind of...
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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 WGIR-AM radio..
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.