Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
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...
Typos weren’t a tipoff in that Peterborough email scam
One of the interesting human-factor issues in email spam is typos and grammar errors. As you may now, they are often badly written/typed on purpose as a gullibility filter: People who aren't turned off by the obvious mistakes are more likely to fall for the follow-up...
“Leaves of three, loves climate emer-gen-cy”
The climate emergency is creating a lot of awful results but I really hate one of its lesser products: More and stronger poison ivy. I am pretty sensitive to the <expletive deleted> stuff. It's been known for a while that more CO2 in the atmosphere makes the plant...
The weather’s getting bad. Enjoy it while you can
Maybe I shouldn’t tempt the gods by saying this out loud but New Hampshire had a darn good summer, weather-wise. Yeah, it was miserably hot and humid sometimes, not New England-y at all, and it was alarmingly dry in the first half and too wet in the second half. North...
Nation’s first mutual bank in 50 years looks to serve the region’s farms
Everybody knows what local farms need: Land, buildings, seeds, animals, workers, people to buy what they grow. But don’t forget money, because that’s often the hardest to get. “The FDIC calls those types of businesses ‘informationally opaque.’ They don’t have...
Organic farming is complicated & not always for the reasons you’d think
By Cassidy Jensen, Concord Monitor: New pests driven north by climate change. Drought followed by record-breaking rain. Large competitors that charge lower prices while capitalizing on a trendy label. These are just some of the 21st century challenges facing the...
Fleets of vehicles will go electric, and here’s a good N.H. example
Back in February I wrote about electric-vehicle plans by Merchants Fleet, a Hooksett firm (sister to Merchants Auto) that owns $1.4 billion worth of trucks and vans and limos and cars that its leases to 120 companies in the U.S. and Canada. It manages over 150,000...
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