Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Flying cars! Times two!!
There are not one but two companies with a presence in New Hampshire working on flying cars, although the vehicles more accurately described as planes that can drive. If you want to learn more - and you know you do - click through to my story in the Concord Monitor....
“The Placebo Effect Works And You Can Catch It From Your Doctor”
That excellent headline is on this excellent NPR article about an interesting study by Dartmouth researchers who found evidence that "patients can pick up on subtle facial cues from doctors that reveal the doctor's belief in how effective a treatment will be. And that...
Vt. city tries out a blockchain-fueled polling app
Since June, South Burlington, Vt. has been partnering with Consensus, a Toronto-based tech firm, on a new smartphone application that allows South Burlington to poll its residents on public policy questions. That's from an article on Seven Days Vermont, one of two...
If first frost is coming later, it’s hard to see in Concord
My weather wishfulness is split this time of year. I want it to get cold so skiing will start, but I want it to stay warm so all those green tomatoes in my garden will ripen before frost. This mental quandary led me to wonder how the date of our first frost is being...
Another makerspace in N.H. (Concord will *finally* get one)
Concord will soon be joining the ranks of New Hampshire cities with a community do-it-yourself center known as a makerspace. A nonprofit that has long been working on bringing a makerspace to the city has signed a lease on a portion of the former Beede Electric...
Other NH towns would like that broadband deal
This year the little town Chesterfield partnered with Consolidated Communications to bring fiber-to-the-home to the towns. The Keene Sentinel reports that a number of other towns in the region would like to do the same thing (story is here): Officials from several...
Wait – the first secure Internet retail sale took place in Nashua?!?
This is embarrassing! I just learned that a vital bit of Internet history happened in Nashua in 1994, when I was a reporter at the city's newspaper who was writing about the online world, yet I've never heard of it before. According to a 1994 article in the New York...
Hunting with ferrets, and roadable aircraft: Lawmakers get to work.
This is the time of year that legislators in the New Hampshire state government start the process of submitting bills. First the 400 representatives and 24 state senators draft a Legislative Service Request, which is basically a general idea for a law. It gets whipped...
Playing in the dirt when it’s 140 million miles away
If Elon Musk ever makes it to Mars, he’ll grab his phone and start tweeting. Frances Rivera-Hernandez, on the other hand, would grab a shovel. “I want to dig some pits to see if the ground ice is there and how much,” said Rivera-Hernandez, a post-doc in Earth science...
Is the Internet changing English?
Where do languages come from? Is the Internet changing English? Can I split infinitives? Why do some languages have masculine/feminine nouns but we don't? Why is “enough” spelled so weird? Come and ask your questions about the science linguistics – a topic we’ve never...
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