Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Another right-to-repair bill for N.H. is in trouble
A N.H. legislative committee has narrowly given a thumbs-down to a watered-down version of a "right-to-repair" law, continuing the trend of lawmakers in the Live Free or Die state saying people shouldn't be free to fiddle with things they buy. The bill would require...
When is a tiny house not a tiny house? When it’s a cottage home!
The city of Dover has approved a development of 44 houses on 7 acres, each of them 384 square feet. They are called "cottage homes". I'm not sure how that differentiates from a tiny house, which is usually defined as less than 400 square feet. Seacoast Online has the...
How do creeks and hills get their names (and can I play, too)?
UPDATE: I posted this on Reddit and my "best name" was promptly beaten: https://geonames.usgs.gov/apex/f?p=138:3:::NO:3:P3_FID,P3_TITLE:865853,Bumfagging%20Hill The contest for Best Name of a Geographic Object in New Hampshire has a new champion, thanks to an...
Politically pragmatic climate expert from N.H. heads to the White House
A New Hampshire native is among the folks bringing climate change expertise to the White House after a four-year absence, and she's a different sort of climate expert, according to E&E News. Her appointment signals a new approach to climate policy under President...
Can a less large – but still large – turbine make “small wind” a thing?
A Massachusetts start-up is trying to develop a wind turbine sized between the backyard ones that are mostly a flop and the huge ones that are great at generation but unpopular with neighbors. EnergyNews story is here. A New England startup is betting its small...
N.H. patents through March 7
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Feb. 28 to March 7. *** Parallel Wireless Assigned Patent for RAN for Multimedia Delivery Parallel Wireless, Nashua, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent (No. 10,939,348, initially...
Very first New Englanders might have spotted a woolly mammoth or two
In fossil-deprived Northern New England, where geology melted dinosaur remains and glaciers ground up everything else, woolly mammoths are special. (Addendum: They're so special that a project at Harvard called Revive & Restore is trying to use genetics to revive...
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Fusion power is coming!
The Boston Globe has an update on Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff that is working on a fusion reactor. It's going to build a manufacturing facility in Devens, Mass. and says it has "developed highly sophisticated electromagnets that can confine the plasma...
It’s windier than normal … or is it? (redux)
It's very windy today in New Hampshire - lots of power lines down but not the ones to my house, thankfully. I've posted a couple items about wind speeds at Concord Municipal Airport, the National Weather Service's official measuring spot, in response to reader...
Building a better ‘canary trap’
Most of us have heard of computer network "honey traps" to lure in bad guys, but "canary traps" are new to me: "The canary trap technique in espionage spreads multiple versions of false documents to conceal a secret." At Dartmouth, cybersecurity folks are using AI to...
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