Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
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...
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...
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