Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Very big, high-tech-ish greenhouses are the future (and present) of New England salad greens
There’s nothing new about growing produce for New England markets inside a big greenhouse, but the huge expansion coming to Loudon’s high-tech hydroponic operation reflects not only the industry’s growth but also this unavoidable fact: California is a long way...
Maine will make companies, not taxpayers, pick up the cost of packaging waste
Capitalism is incredibly effective because it makes all decisions based on one quantifiable measurement: The dollar cost of an action and potential return. Nothing else matters. In my lifetime this hyper-focused approach has overwhelmed all competing economic systems...
LIDAR and stone walls (lots and lots of stone walls)
The NH Geological Survey has an interesting online project called the Stone Wall Mapper that wants to map all the tens of thousands of miles of stone walls in the state. But the project doesn't involve crawling around with a GPS - it finds walls on LIDAR mapping of...
Can you build a new school without adding to the climate disaster?
UPDATE: A letter-writer to the Monitor pointed out that burning wood for heat (as Concord's downtown did fairly recently, until Concord Steam went belly-up) is a renewable option for the new school that I didn't mention. As if building a new school wasn’t complicated...
The crunchy-granola set is still an antivax hotbed
Before COVID brought antivax group-think to the far-right authoritarian crowd it was mostly found in the far-left back-to-the-earth set. It's still there: Seven Days has a good piece (read it here) about an independent publishing house in Vermont that is happily...
N.H. patents through Sept. 26
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Sept. 19 to Sept. 26. ** Parallel Wireless Assigned Patent for 5G Interoperability Architecture Parallel Wireless, Nashua, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent (No. 11,129,240,...
New York says yes to Quebec hydropower as Maine waffles
Quebec wants to sell more of its enormous amounts of hydropower to the Northeast U.S., which wants more renewable energy. The problem is that the electricity has to get from there to here and nobody wants big, ugly power lines near them - "near" being defined as...
We don’t need no stinkin’ area code! Oh, wait, yes we do
In one month - October 24 - dialing the 603 area code will become necessary to make local calls to some new Hampshire numbers. By next June, it will be required for all numbers. Phone companies are starting to alert people about it, noting that things like "life...
Developing an autonomous crop-weeding robot in Biddeford (Biddeford?!?)
Mainebiz has an article about a small startup in Biddeford, Maine, that's developing an autonomous robot for weeding crops. This seems a non-trivial problem (said a guy who occasionally uproots the things he's trying to grow). They're approaching it like this: We’ve...
Zoo animals getting COVID vaccines
Northern New England isn't great zoo territory, for better or worse, but at least two area zoos have taken to giving some of their animals COVID-19 vaccines, reports WCVB-TV: The highest risk species at Zoo New England(which owns Franklin Park Zoo in Boston and Stone...
Return to the Concord Monitor