Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
U-L: “Have we reached a tipping point on climate change?”
The Union-Leader's news pages are quite different from its opinion page, especially the political opinion, thank goodness. A good example is in today's paper: A sober look at the reality of climate change by long-time reporter Shawne Wickham in today's paper is an...
Hiking to find Big Trees (with a guidebook)
It sounds deep and zen-like to say it’s the journey rather than the arrival that matters but let’s be honest: It’s more fun to end up somewhere interesting. Like at a really big tree. Trees are awesome creatures even if you don’t hug them – but for me, the larger they...
Not just cougars; we can argue about whether wolves are here, too!
As regular readers know, I am very, very, VERY skeptical that any mountain lions exist in New Hampshire despite the constant parade of "I know what I saw!" I await no actual evidence - game camera shots, prey killed in ways that cougars do it, DNA from scat or hair...
Would a Northeast hydrogen hub be good? bad? something else?
The question of where hydrogen fits into the clean-energy future is complicated and I don't really understand what parts are good and what are bad. It's all so nebulous and theoretical right now that it's easy to make compelling-sounding arguments which paint it as a...
Science Cafe NH tries to decide what to do
Personally, I am done with hosting monthly Science Cafe events in person. A decade of that was enough! I may host the occasional event, like the one we held at the Market Days festival on Main Street in Concord this summer, but that's it. SCNH folks based in Nashua...
This COVID summer has been so unlike past ones, who knows what is next?
We’ve just about made it through a third pandemic summer and the question on everybody’s mind – at least, those who aren’t pretending that COVID has gone away – is whether we’re going to have a third surge this fall and winter. In 2020, New Hampshire went from having...
N.H. patents through Aug. 28
By Targeted News Service WASHINGTON – The following federal patents were assigned in New Hampshire through Aug. 28. *** Parallel Wireless Assigned Patent for 4G/5G Core Interworking Parallel Wireless, Nashua, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent (No. 11,425,790,...
Saddle up to give taxpayers some green-energy profit
In the current list of New Hampshire job openings, the coolest title has to be Energy Circuit Rider. If you’re as old as me your first thought was “Hi-yo, Silver, away!” but the job does not involve riding horses. At least, it doesn’thave to involve riding horses,...
Sometimes, keen-eyed raptors just charge in blindly
If you're a hawk trying to get dinner in mid-air by grabbing one juicy bat out of a huge swarm of bats, how should you proceed? A new paper in Nature partly written by three UNH professors at the Center for Acoustics Research and Education in Durham says they just...
Car fire in a news story requires clarification nowadays
I've been a newspaper reporter for four decades and have written many stories about car fires. The latest is the first time I had to include this sentence: "The car was gasoline powered." No detail yet from fire dept. on make/model so I thought that line was necessary...
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