Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
How do grids know what’s going on with all our rooftop solar?
When my 5 kW rooftop solar system kicks into gear most of what it does is reduce my power usage, although on a day like yesterday - 35 kWh, the equivalent of 7 hours of full production thanks to cool weather and a sunny day! - it sends some electricity into the grid....
More cases from more testing, not necessarily more disease
As many people, including me, have noted, the shortage of COVID-19 testing makes data about its prevalence in the community suspect. A perfect example came up at Thursday's press conference by N.H. officials - here's the item I reported for the Monitor: The number of...
COVID-19 in N.H. more common in women, most minorities, middle-aged
I'm slightly hesitant to read too much into the state's weekly analysis of COVID-19 because testing is still not widespread. There's a real risk of garbage- in-garbage-out because data about who has the disease isn't comprehensive. Keeping that proviso in mind, here's...
Nanotags allow amazing tracking of birds, butterflies and bats
A grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) will enable a New England research partnership to expand a new migration tracking system across New England. The three-year, Competitive State Wildlife Grant of $998,000 will be matched by $355,500 in private...
Fly around the world (virtually) in a DC-3
The Aviation Museum of New Hampshire has launched a new distance learning program: a virtual around-the-world flight that can be followed online by everyone as it progresses around the globe. Using the museum's Elite Flight Simulator and Lockheed Martin's Prepare 3D...
For fighting climate change, COVID will make us: (a) stronger, (b) weaker, (c) who the heck knows
This was supposed to have been a very different column. The plan, long in the works, was for us to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on Wednesday with a flurry of activity. Granite Geek would put a New Hampshire spin on Project Breakdown, which calibrates the...
How can we reopen? Here’s how
If you ignore the dunderheads who think everything can go back to normal tomorrow and the paranoids who think this is the unavoidable End of Days, there remains a big question about how exactly life should resume in the COVID-19 era. A whole bunch of intelligent...
A sweeping citizen science program for Earth Day
Earth Challenge 2020 has launched - an interesting program with two goals. First goal is to aggregate existing citizen science from around the world and make it interoperable, creating a coordinated point of entry for the research and public policy community. Second,...
UNH gets $6 million contract for space weather instrument
From UNH News Service: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA have selected the University of New Hampshire Space Science Center to design and build a specialized instrument to improve space weather monitoring and forecasting capabilities. The...
Bottling milk in the time of COVID
Dairy farms are bad from the climate-change point of view, but I've always loved visiting them. (Working at them, with those 6 a.m. milkings, might be another matter.) So I jumped at the chance to write about Contoocook Creamery, which unusually for small New...
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