Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Dartmouth Students win NASA challenge with lunar rover built in a garage
Science and engineering are full of acronyms, of course. Some are good and some are not. This one is good: Their idea, SHREWs — Strategic Highly-compliant Roving Explorers of other Worlds — is inspired by the rodents of the same name, which link up mouth to tail in a...
Life during COVID: Toss, wipe, water
Since I work for the Concord Monitor, this story is Concord-specific. But I bet the situation is the same for your city. Looking back on 2020, it’s clear that people in Concord did three things when the pandemic hit: Threw stuff out, watered the lawn and wiped down...
U.S. population growth was lowest in 100 years, and that was before COVID-19
The U.S. population growth rate last year was the lowest in 100 years. From 2010 to 2019, rural America lost population for the first time in history, and COVID-19 is likely to further exacerbate this trend, according to a researcher with the NH Agricultural...
Got a little confused signing up for a vaccine? Me, too
As a guy with “geek” in the name of his newspaper column I’m supposed to be techy-savvy, so it’s embarrassing to admit how confused I got when signing up for a COVID-19 vaccine this week. Perhaps my experience will help those who sign up down the road. The big problem...
Dartmouth engineering professor wins an Emmy (wait – an Emmy?!?!)
Eric Fossum, Dartmouth's John H. Krehbiel Sr. Professor for Emerging Technologies, is one of a few recipients of the 72nd Annual Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards. The honor, a first for Dartmouth engineering faculty, comes from the National Academy of Television...
Predicting COVID from viruses in our wastewater is a lot trickier than I thought
Twice a week a courier picks up a bucket of pretty unsavory stuff from the Concord wastewater plant and drives it a half-hour west to the huge Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center complex in Lebanon, where it joins what is basically a big wet-lab experiment. The goal of...
N.H. patents through Jan. 24
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Jan. 17 to Jan. 24. *** Nonvologic Assigned Patent for Chemical Detection Mixture with Integrated Circuit Microsensor Elements Nonvologic, Meredith, New Hampshire, has been assigned a...
At current vaccination rates, ‘herd immunity’ is more than a year away
Since it started last summer the Monitor’s weekly COVID tracker has sometimes had to present depressing data. Here’s the latest: At our current rate of vaccination, New Hampshire won’t get close to “herd immunity” until November of 2022. That’s right: Not 2021, but...
I am starting to have doubts about space travel, even as Science Cafe ponders it
f there’s any single thing that marks somebody as a geek in the original sense, it’s space travel. Computers were once the sign of true geekdom but now everybody is into computers at some level. Excitement about getting beyond Earth’s gravity is now the defining geek...
Speaking of invasive plants, it’s not easy to uproot them along a river
A stretch of tangled, mostly invasive plants that has taken over the Merrimack River riverbank by Fort Eddy Plaza in Concord will be mowed down this winter as the first step of possible eradication, and with any luck, the owners of nearby land will join in. “I’m...
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