by David Brooks | Dec 18, 2015 | Blog
Today’s depressing weather chart is shown above, taken from this analysis by Climate Central. It shows that on average, winter temperatures in New Hampshire (presumably meaning Concord, where the National Weather Service has its official site) have risen four...
by David Brooks | Dec 18, 2015 | Blog
My former newspaper, the Nashua Telegraph, has a big story today about the opening of the new Star Wars movie (as does my current paper and every other paper in the contiguous United States). Alas, I expect Nashua to be picketed by enraged geeks, because the big...
by David Brooks | Dec 17, 2015 | Blog
From UNH: American chestnut has been under attack for a century from a persistent chestnut blight that has killed trees from Georgia to Maine and west to the Ohio River Valley. A potentially blight-resistant American chestnut tree plantation planned for the University...
by David Brooks | Dec 17, 2015 | Blog
Nature has a list of its 20 favorite science books of the year (why 20? if they weren’t choosing the obvious 10 you’d think they’d pick a more scientific number like 16 (2^4)) – and it struck me that 19 of the titles include a colon. Examples...
by David Brooks | Dec 16, 2015 | Blog
Some important stories are really boring, and it’s to get much duller than “electric grid operators in New England and New York take steps to coordinate their operations” – but the news is actually pretty important. The press release by ISO-New...
by David Brooks | Dec 16, 2015 | Blog
Spent nuclear fuel – material that no longer releases enough of the right sort of energy to sustain a reaction in a power plant – is a pain in the neck. It has to be stored until its no longer dangerous, which takes hundreds or thousands of years, but...