Who should pay for recycling? Maine thinks maybe it should be the producer
As regular readers know, in the past year I have come to think that the recycling programs we've all grown up with are a joke or every a deliberate sham that acts a figleaf, allowing maximum production of stuff that lingers forever while shoving all the costs of...
Bill would require internet providers to reimburse for outages
New Hampshire's enormous legislature generations hundreds of bills, and while most of them go nowhere there can be some interesting ideas that get lost in the shuffle. Here's one, highlighted by Bob Sanders of NH Business Review: House Bill 1578 would require internet...
The other ‘flying car’ company in N.H. is starting to make noise
As I noted in October, there are two companies with a presence in New Hampshire developing or selling "flying cars" (more accurately called planes that can drive on roads). One is Terrafugia, which has been developing a four-wheel car with folding wings in...
R&D spending has gone up a lot in New Hampshire, but venture capital investment has nose-dived
The National Science Board has issued its 2020 Science and Engineering Indicators report, which looks at things like college degrees and spending on research and start-ups. Some conclusions for New Hampshire in 2018: About 5.3% of people working in New Hampshire were...
People in Vermont drive a lot more than people in New Hampshire
A little state-by-state crunching of numbers by a site called Green Car Congress found that in 2018, Vermonters drove more piles per person than other New England states - even more than Maine, which is much bigger. STATE - Miles per capita - rank Vermont - 11,766 -...
Coyote rabies, as found in N.H. attack, is rare
Rabies is a complicated disease with different strains that affect different animals species differently, and their prevalence waxes and wanes over the years for reasons not always obvious to us. The announcement that a coyote strangled by a New Hampshire dad after it...
13K miles of stone walls in New Hampshire — so far
The N.H. Stone Wall Mapping program is an online project that lets people identify stone walls via LIDAR images of the region. As of this moment, they have found 12,700 miles of walls all over New Hampshire. (I wrote about the project a year ago) (Only Strafford...
EV charging corridors are creeping closer
New Hampshire is (finally) doing something to encourage electric vehicles in the state, using some of its Volkswagen dieselgate money to prod some fast-charging corridors. I've written about it many times - the U-L has a nice update. The contract starts in April.
DNA & a very, very cold case
You're familiar, I'm sure, with DNA being used to solve old murder cases. (The Bear Brook case in NH is a classic example.) Beth Potier of UNH wrote an article about a *really* cold case: A UNH biological anthropologist has helped crack a case that turned out to be...
When pets travel, pet diseases also travel
From UNH News Service: A pathologist with the New Hampshire Diagnostic Veterinary Lab at the University of New Hampshire recently diagnosed the fungal disease Valley Fever in a rescue dog from Arizona. It is the first time the lab has diagnosed this disease in a dog...
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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.