Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
D-H starts clinical trial for possible COVID treatment
From D-H News: A behind-the-scenes group at Dartmouth-Hitchcock (D-H) research operations leads and investigators has opened a pair of Phase 3 therapeutic studies of a potential treatment for COVID-19 in a remarkable six days. Such tests can typically take 60...
PCBs are still tainting our fish, 45 years after we stopped making them
More than 40 years after the U.S. stopped making the chemicals known as PCBs, the human-made lubricants are still causing problems in New Hampshire including new restrictions on eating fish caught in Squam Lake. The state Department of Environmental Services has...
‘Flight-fear’ did what ‘flight-shaming’ couldn’t
Look at that chart from Flighttrader24.com showing global commercial airline flights this year! I don't think there's been a single event that has such a quick world-wide economic effect since the start of World War II - and even that was more stretched out over time...
Cars are disappearing from NH highways – trucks, not so much
The COVID-19 shutdown continues to be visible on New Hampshire highways – or, rather, invisible, since the big difference is the cars that aren’t there. That’s cars, not trucks: So far, the number of truck trips on the state’s turnpike system hasn’t declined very...
Can I write about something that isn’t related to COVID, like hempcrete?
The weirdest thing has happened to me since the COVID-19 crackdown arrived. I’m actually feeling less stressed.Why? I think it’s because I can only consider one existential crisis at a time and apparently my lizard brain is less afraid of disease-fueled social...
We made the same mistakes with Spanish Flu that we made with COVID-19
Back in 1918, the excuse for downplaying a growing public-health crisis was World War I - didn't want to hurt the war morale, and then we had to turn buildings in downtown Concord into emergency hospitals. I wrote about it for the Monitor. This year, the excuse was...
Carbon Cash-Back proposal was supported in towns, 2.3 to 1
It seems a million years ago but back when we were only worried about global climate catastrophe and not also imminent disease-caused societal collapse, there was a push for a non-binding warrant to support “fee to be paid by vendors of carbon-based fuels based on...
Eversource shelves battery plan for N.H. town (with update)
UPDATE: See the bottom for Consumer Advocate Don Kreis' explanation of why his office opposed this plan. How about some depressing news not related to COVID? An intriguing proposal to use 7.1 megawatt lithium-ion battery storage and some demand control to improve...
COVID and America’s population stagnation
The U.S. was already facing a very slow rate of population growth, due to smaller families among non-Hispanic whites and to our crackdown on immigration, before COVID-19 scrambled everything. Now there's a possibility that deaths may exceed births in the country as a...
Yes you should clean surfaces, but COVID often spreads via aerosols – hence ‘distancing’
As the COVID-19 shutdown spreads, we know not to get close to other people. But what about pets? Swingsets in the park? The daily copy of the Concord Monitor? Should we stay away from those, too? This virus is so new that answers are still being developed, but a study...
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