Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Married women face a middle-name roadblock for Real ID
A reader alerted us to a weird anomaly: Many married women who take their husband's last name but use their maiden name as their middle name find that their marriage certificate doesn't provide legal evidence of that middle-name change. This is proving an obstacle...
‘Electronics surplus store going the way of transistors’
The right-to-repair folks in central New Hampshire should be mourning, because an iconic (to a certain segment of the population) electronics surplus store in Manchester is shutting down. Mark Hayward, the Union-Leader's excellent city columnist, visited and wrote...
Escaped N.H. sewer disks are still floating around the world
I've written about the Hooksett sewer disks and their trans-Atlantic voyage many times (here are examples from 2019 and 2018) but the story of the 4 million biofilm disks that escaped in 2011 never gets old. They're still turning up on beaches in North America and,...
Winter is hard for solar panels (specifically, mine)
Photovoltaic electricity is great stuff and we need lots more of it - but it does have shortcomings. A snowy December, when the sun is low on the horizon, has shown me (a new owner of PV rooftop panels) just how big the shortcomings can be. The chart below shows the...
Study finds wearing a helmet doesn’t help if you ski like an idiot
A major study of skiing injuries brought to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center from 35 ski areas in New Hampshire and Vermont shows that, despite what some people think, wearing a helmet doesn't make you invulnerable: One conclusion of the study: despite helmeted...
Our ranked-choice voting primary showed that some people *love* ranked-choice voting
We got 385 ballots mailed to the Monitor for our ranked-choice voting mock election - at least three times as many as I expected. Want to know more? Of course you do - so click right here and read!
How much of New Hampshire will be “hard to count” in the census?
The Center for Urban Research at City University of New York has put out an interesting mapping tool that estimates how hard it will be for the 2020 census to reach various parts of the country. The estimate is based on how many households in each area mailed back...
Think outside the box to save bats
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hs set up a sort of mini-X-Prize for ideas to help bats threatened by white-nose syndrome, the fungus that has wiped out entire populations of bats throughout the country. What's interesting about this challenge, which offers up to...
Science Cafe panelist (oh, yes, also a UNH scientist) wins big recognition
Serita Frey, professor of soil microbial ecology at the University of New Hampshire and a researcher with the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station, has been named one of the most highly cited researchers in the world, a distinction earned by fewer than 0.1...
On battery storage, N.H. isn’t even in the race
Check out that map reflecting the state-by-state status of battery storage, made by Greentech Media. New Hampshire's zero status puts us in the minority alongside such cutting-edge powerhouses as Mississippi and North Dakota. Pretty embarrassing for a state that likes...
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