Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Study: Switching from heating oil to local wood cuts greenhouse gasses
(Note: Turns out this refers to a study from three years ago that I covered at the time. Oops.) If Northern New England homes switched from heating by burning fuel oil to burning wood pellets or chips made in the Northeast, they'd cut their greenhouse gas emissions by...
Electric plane coming to Cape Cod-based airline
The power-to-weight ratio of batteries and electric motors doesn't seem like they'd work for aviation, but who knows: An Israeli company called Eviation says that by 2022 it will deliver a 9-passenger electric airplane to Cape Air, a small airline that connects Cape...
N.H. patents through Nov. 6
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Nov. 1 to Nov. 6 *** Hypertherm Assigned Patent for Cooling Plasma Cutting System Hypertherm, Hanover, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent (No. 10,827,600, initially filed April...
If true geothermal arrives here, it’ll have to be around Conway
Every few years attention returns to geothermal power in the U.S. - as with this excellent recent overview from Vox's David Roberts, who says it is ""poised for a big breakout." - which gives me an excuse to talk about how the Conway region is one of the most likely...
Right-to-repair expansion wins big in Massachusetts
Massachusetts has the country's best right-to-repair law, although it only cover certain aspects of automotive repair information. On Tuesday it got better: Voters overwhelmingly enlarged it by a 75% to 25% margin, which is getting close to North Korea levels of...
Problems at our first offshore wind farm: Overly shallow wires
Offshore wind farms - even dinky ones, like Block Island off Rhode Island - are very big engineering projects. And with very big engineering projects, you can get very big expensive mistakes. They've got one at Block Island, reports E&E News: The rocky saeabed...
Ranked-choice voting just might decide the future of America (Update: Or not)
Wednesday morning note: This was written Monday and I should really rewrite it, since Collins won pretty handily in Maine and the push failed in Massachusetts, 55%-45%. But I'm beat and frazzled from the endless election, so it'll have to stand. It’s not entirely out...
COVID tracker: More cases enter the hospital, a really bad sign
Ever since COVID-19 arrived and turned us all into amateur epidemiologists poring over hospital reports and debating antibody counts, we’ve really just wanted the answer to one question: “How worried should we be?” Right now, unfortunately, the answer is: Increasingly...
Dam removal in northern N.H.
New Hampshire, like much of the country, is full of small, no-longer-used dams that chup up streams and rivers into semi-connected pieces. this is bad for a lot of ecological reasons. Removing old dams can be expensive and often causes other problems, such as release...
Maine firm will (maybe) make biofuel from wood waste
A firm in Bangor, Maine says it is "close" to building a biorefinery that will turn wood waste from paper and lumber mills into liquid fuel that would be sold by New Hampshire's Sprague Resources. As reported by the Portland Press-Herald's Tux Turkel (story is here),...
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