Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
New Hampshire is getting a mass-timber building
A few days ago I wrote about the way that engineered timber, a.k.a. mass timber, can replace steel and sometimes concrete in buildings, which creates big greenhouse-gas benefits. Here's the item, if you didn't see it. I mentioned that New Hampshire is behind our...
“Clockwise” is losing meaning in a digital world
Steven Strogatz, a Cornell math professor and math communicator (I'm waiting for his much-praised book "Infinite Powers" about calculus to come out in paperback) had an interesting series of Tweets over the weekend that began: "I've long worried about this, and it is...
Tall buildings made with wood help loggers and the climate
Tackling the biggest problems of the world today and in the future could benefit from technologies of the past. “This is back to the future,” is how Joe Short, vice president of Northern Forest Center, put it at the start of a conference Friday discussing mass timber,...
Maine would be great for a spaceport, Part II (with tech startup addition)
Last November I had an item about vague thoughts of creating an orbital small launching facility at closed air bases in northern Maine, using small rockets to launch cubesats. As I said at the time, "More like Wallops Island, Virginia, than Cape Canaveral." That idea...
N.H. data-visualization geeks, celebrate
Do you like data? Do you like data about demographics and economics and other topics that shape how the world works? Of course you do, Granite Geek fan. So UNH Carsey School of Public Policy has a treat for you: They've taken "What is New Hampshire?", a chart-filled...
Make popcorn, fire up YouTube, learn about electric car infrastructure
The September Science Cafe NH in Concord talked about the state's options for expanding electric vehicles via charging and other options. It lasted two hours and, as Science Cafe is wont to do, the conversation covered lots of topics from battery chemistry to signage....
Goats vs. invasive weeds, an update
There are a ton of really horrible invasive weeds out there, but Japanese knotweed might be the horriblest. In the UK it has gotten so bad that you have trouble getting a mortgage if the plant is found within seven meters of your property line, partly because its...
Native Americas didn’t make stone buildings but that doesn’t mean they weren’t here
New Hampshire covers about 6 million acres and people were living and traveling all over it for at least 12,000 years before Europeans arrived. But those pre-Contact people didn’t leave much evidence for us to see. The Granite State doesn’t have a stonehenge or huge...
Lyme disease podcast listening guide
Podcasts can be a terrific source of long-form journalism, but if you don't have a long commute and don't want to sit in the living room and listen to the radio the way people did in the 1930's before TV, podcasts can be too long. That might be a problem with the...
NH researchers are frozen into Arctic ice, but only just
Some researchers from Dartmouth are among the many scientists participating in a research project that involves a ship getting frozen into the Arctic ice for a year. That's not an original idea - the great polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen did it 120 years ago - but this...
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