Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
What’s hard about studying a White Mountain butterfly? Pretty much everything.
When first described to me, it sounded like a simple task: Figure out how to protect a butterfly that lives only on the Presidential Range. Simple? Ha! Nothing’s simple in wildlife biology, especially when you’re dealing with a tiny creature – the caterpillars are so...
Why do some species glow under UV light?
The Science Director at the Harris Center for Conservation Education in Hancock writes an outdoors column for the Valley News. The latest looks at biofluorescence, the interesting but not well-understood process by which parts of various species (NH amphibians among...
Nitrogen-fixing bacteria are incredibly important, so let’s try to improve them
From UNH News Service: A researcher at the University of New Hampshire has received a USDA grant to develop new gene editing tools that could help scientists unravel how certain bacteria, which were previously understudied, promote growth in plants and protect them...
An alarming-looking environmental thing that isn’t alarming
So many bad things are happening in the environment that the sight of what looks like huge balls of cotton candy all over some trees feels like the latest new disaster. But don’t fret: They’re routine and not as bad as they look. These aren’t gypsy moths or tent...
The mystery of Off-High-Medium-Low rather than Off-Low-Medium-High
In a sign that I am spending too much time in my AC-free home office that gets pretty toasty in the afternoon, I recently asked this on Twitter: On most (all?) electric fans with several speeds, the setting on the control knob closest to "off" is "high" - subsequent...
N.H. patents through Aug. 30
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Aug. 23 to Aug. 30. *** Parallel Wireless Assigned Patent for Self-Calibrating, Self-Adjusting Network Parallel Wireless, Nashua, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent (No....
Maine joins the big-solar bandwagon
A clean-energy firm is proposing three utility-scale solar projects in Maine totaling 201 megawatt capacity, cost $100 million or so. One would be associated with a wood-burning power plant which, as has happened to electricity-only wood-burning in New Hampshire, is...
What is a geek?
New Hampshire magazine has a number of articles under the "Nerd Power" title this month - including this different sort of paean to Ralph Baer, inventor of the first home video game. I was asked to contribute something, so I contributed this: A geek is somebody who...
An Ethernet cable runs down my hallway but it’s not my fault – it’s the house’s fault!
(Note: A good long video explaining the system can be seen via this Treehugger article) Judging from my decades of life experience there is an iron-clad rule about every room in every house ever built: The electric outlets are in the wrong place. Outlets are always,...
COVID numbers good but school is looming
The latest report from the Monitor’s weekly tracking of the COVID-19 pandemic is very upbeat but it feels like a scorecard from the final baseball game of the regular season: Almost irrelevant because everybody’s waiting to see what happens in the playoffs. The...
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