Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Dartmouth joins the hunt for world’s oldest ice
From Dartmouth News Service: Dartmouth Engineering has been named a collaborator on a new National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded effort to locate Antarctica's oldest ice and learn more about how the Earth's climate has changed throughout history. The Center for...
Farmers try to improve, rather than worsen, the climate crisis
Excellent piece in the Valley News this weekend about some farmers trying to figure out how to make agriculture part of climate improvement instead of climate degradation: Farmers are envisioning ways to harmonize the production of food and the sequestration of...
N.H. month-long BioBlitz winds up
The month-long BioBlitz project (which I previewed here) has wound up with people taking pictures of almost 7,000 plants and animals in more than 100 communities as they explored local town-owned lands. NHPR has a quick recap.
Estimate: When it comes to CO2, Manchester airport takeoffs = 1/9 of all the cars in the state
A new online tool called Airport Tracker, a joint project by the non-profits International Council on Clean Transportation, ODI, and Transport and Environment, says annual takeoffs at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport produce as much CO2 as the annual pollution of...
It’s our biggest rooftop solar array! That’s not saying much in N.H.
The largest rooftop solar array in New Hampshire was unveiled on Wednesday and is going to make a big impact on the state. But not for the right reason. “Just to put it in perspective … these 3,400 panels will add an entire 1% to New Hampshire's total fleet of...
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...
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