People want good news but not enough to keep a newspaper open
Amidst the national (global) decline of print journalism, the closing of the Suncook Valley Sun, a free weekly based in Pittsfield, isn’t a big deal. It had no reporters and depended on submissions from readers, either columns or letters. They fell into...Science Cafe is back in Concord: Genes, genealogy and cold cases
One of the most surprising big-picture changes that has taken place during my life is the way biology has taken the mantel of “most interesting scientific field” from physics. When I was a kid, all the little geeks wanted to become physicists. Physics had relativity...
It’s March Madness month, for CoCoRaHS
Regular readers will know that for close to a decade I’ve measured precipitation every day for a national citizen-science group called CoCoRaHS (Community Collaborative Rain Hail Snow network). I mention it so often that some readers have made fun of me for it...
Celebrate World Water Day – tour a sewage plant
What better way to spend your lunch hour than visiting the local sewage-treatment plant? That’s not a joke – wastewater plants are fascinating places full of interesting engineering solutions and they usually don’t smell bad. I heartily recommend...
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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 New Hampshire Public 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.