Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Growing oysters is as good for the Great Bay as it is for your dinner
We tree-hugging types face a conundrum when it comes to our love of local food and farms because it’s easy for agriculture to be an environmental bad guy. For example, I’m a big supporter of my local chicken farm – their automatic egg-sorting machine is a Rube...
Judge: Global climate emergency doesn’t justify inconveniencing a coal train
New Hampshire Public Radio reports that a judge has "again rejected an attempt to use a competing harms defense for five protesters who tried to stop a train bringing coal to the Merrimack Station power plant in 2019." Judge Andrew Schulman ... had already denied the...
N.H. patents through Sept. 19
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Sept. 12 to Sept. 19. *** Parallel Wireless Assigned Patent for Elastic Local, Global Scheduling for Cellular Infrastructure Parallel Wireless, Nashua, New Hampshire, has been assigned...
Indoor farming for salad greens keeps getting bigger in NH
The region’s biggest greenhouse grower of salad greens, Lef Farms of Loudon, has been purchased by a national firm which plans to enlarge it. New York-based Brightfarms purchased Lef (pronounced “leaf”) this summer for an undisclosed amount. The company says it plans...
Wikipedia article on Benford’s Law drew a lot of attention during Calif. recall
I have written several times over the years about the fascinating pattern known as Benford's Law, which describes the weird pattern in the distribution of the first digit of numbers found in certain large datasets. It was famously noticed because the pages of books...
Can the abrupt end of the last ice age tell us anything about what our climate is going to do?
The Mount Washington Observatory has a Science Cafe-like series called Science in the Mountains which has, like SCNH, gone online during the pandemic. The next one seems particularly interesting: "Charting the Last Great Global Warming: Ice Age Lessons for a Warming...
Hey, it’s (yet another) disastrous invasive insect heading our way!
You will be glad to hear that I have figured out a sure-fire retirement scheme once I’m no longer getting the huge paychecks handed out to newspaper reporters: Breeding praying mantises! No, wait, hear me out. Aside from being the coolest insect (dragonfly aficionados...
NH will never be truly geeky without more Ig Nobel winners (redux)
The 2021 Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded and, once again, nobody from New Hampshire got the most coveted prize in academia. GraniteGeek has long been a big Ig Nobel fan. I have attended more than a dozen of the goofy events at Ha-vahhd, and I brought the founder and...
Dartmouth is ever-hopeful about cellulosic biofuels
The U.S. Department of Energy has given a $1.2 million, three-year grant to Dartmouth engineering professor Daniel Olson, who is investigating the use of biomass to produce next-generation fuels and chemicals. The goal is to use C. thermocellum, a type of bacteria...
N.H. patents through Sept. 12
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Sept. 6 to Sept. 12. *** Deka Products Assigned Patent for System for Remote Patient Care Deka Products, Manchester, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent (No. 11,109,934, initially...
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