Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
A big battery starts up in Maine; we need a lot more of them
Solar is the driving force of the energy transition but batteries are proving to be just as important for 21st century energy. California has brought so many onto the grid that they the state has run on solar for more than a day, with charged-during-daylight batteries...
Region’s offshore wind farms did great in the winter storm
America’s two utility-scale offshore wind farms performed as well as gas power plants and better than coal in January — including during Winter Storm Fern. So says Canary Media in this story The 132-megawatt South Fork Wind farm, which delivers power to Long Island,...
Learn about NH firm developing an autonomous helicopter
A company called Rotor is working to develop an autonomous helicopter, or at least a remotely-controlled one, in buildings at the former Daniel Webster College in Nashua. As I noted in a 2024 article (here), they're an MIT spinoff and Nashua was the closest place...
Keeping hiking trails open is a Sisyphus-ian task (it even includes pushing big rocks around)
New Hampshire has so many hiking trails that if stretched out, they’d reach California and partway back, but one small section is drawing attention right now — a reminder that these “natural” paths that make life in the Granite State so delightful require a ridiculous...
LIDAR at Mount Washington Resort will analyze the bottom of the atmosphere
early January, representatives from Mount Washington Observatory (MWOBS), Vaisala, and the Omni Mount Washington Resort collaborated to install New Hampshire’s first ground-based scanning LiDAR. The Vaisala WindCube 200S Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR), located...
The snow is deep and drifting; time to remind ourselves how snow fences work
Time to rerun this piece from 2016: I have a fairly long driveway next to an open field, and at least once every winter, snow drifts across it to the point where things get dicey without all-wheel drive. For two decades, I have talked about setting up a snow fence to...
New England burning oil to make electricity during a deep freeze is ‘a feature, not a bug’
This is a cut-and-paste, with permission, from a LinkedIn post by Joseph LaRusso at the Acadia Center, responding to an ISO-NE statement about the way New England's electricity has been generated by burning an awful lot of fuel oil during this long cold spell because...
NH ponders (and will probably go with) an end to school vaccination mandates
Balancing the health of a community with the rights of individuals — a long-simmering issue that grew heated during the COVID pandemic and hasn’t cooled since — took center stage Wednesday in a hearing about a bill that would end vaccine mandates in New Hampshire...
Football is good for something – in this case, making fun of Roman numerals
As we all know, the New England Patriots are going to be playing Sunday in Super Bowl 111100. No, wait, that's Base 2. Wrong notation. I mean Super Bowl 0x3C. No, darn it, wrong again. That's Base 16. Super Bowl 0.0006 Lahk? No, that's India's numbering system. Super...
Why are fertility rates falling and what can we do about it? (Spoiler: Nobody knows, and not much)
If you want to start a debate, wonder out loud why human beings all over the world are growing less enthusiastic about having children. People definitely have opinions. You will be told that the fall in fertility rates seen in most of the countries of the world,...
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