Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
N.H. patents through Aug. 9
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Aug. 2 to Aug. 9. *** Hypertherm Assigned Patent for Plasma Power Tool Hypertherm, Hanover, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent (No. 10,736,204, initially filed Oct. 23, 2017) by...
New England offshore wind is getting closer (about time!)
Offshore wind power is to renewable energy as Babe Ruth is to 1930's baseball - in a league by itself. (In 1927 Ruth hit more home runs by himself than were hit by 12 other teams.) Although distributed solar will be bigger on a global scale, for the near future...
Analyzing COVID data with a weird frequency-of-digits law
One of my favorite mathematical thingamajigs is Benford's Law, the weirdly counter-intuitive finding about which digits are most likely to appear in most data sets. Basically, it says that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, no matter how random they...
In Keene they’re hunting COVID in the sewage
If you’ve had a PCR test for COVID-19 you know that collecting the tissue sample takes a few minutes and involves a minor snootful of irritation. But that’s collecting a sample from one person. How about collecting samples from hundreds of people? Oddly enough, it can...
New species found on Harvard solar panels
A new species of bacteria has been discovered living on solar panels atop the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, which is interesting unless it starts to eat the panels or do something like that. I don't want my solar panels eaten. The article about the discovery...
Today’s surprising number: 11,718% increase
A story in today's Monitor about the rise in telemedicine (read it here) contains this sentence: In the first month and a half of the pandemic, there was a 11,718% increase in the number of Medicare beneficiaries using telehealth. I always stumble over...
Uh-oh – N.H. COVID cases are increasing
To be honest, back in March, I thought COVID-19 would be calming down by now. I knew the disease wouldn’t be gone – that will take effective vaccines – but I figured warm weather and months of experience would reduce its impact on our lives. Instead, the coronavirus...
They’re fighting over our coastline, however long it is
A Seacoast Online story about tensions about crowding on the state's ocean beaches starts with the line "New Hampshire’s Atlantic coastline, the smallest in New England, is just 13 miles long, or 18.5 miles if you include inlets," which made me sit up and take notice....
N.H. patents through Aug. 2
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from July 26 to Aug. 2. *** BAE Systems Information & Electronic Systems Integration Assigned Patent for Cyber Warning Receiver BAE Systems Information and Electronic Systems Integration...
N.H. COVID numbers are good – actually, make that ‘were’
On Mondays in the Concord Monitor I run a weekly update of four COVID-related measures in New Hampshire - average number of new cases, whether that number is going down, number of tests per capita and percentage of tests that are positive. If you're a regular Granite...
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