Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Using waste heat is easy, right? Right?
Using "waste heat" from a power plant to do useful stuff sounds really straightforward to somebody like me, who has never had to do it. Then I read this long article in Biomass Magazine about the Burgess Biopower Plant in Berlin, which has a lot of adjacent land for...
Augmented reality can be eyes for the blind
Augmented reality, in which technology shows us extra information as we make our way through the world, might be a cool concept but so far it’s kind of a dud, since the biggest impact has been “Pokemon Go.” Is finding invisible monsters in the street with a smartphone...
Cougars will be here eventually – meaning they’re not here now
The Union-Leader, which knows an audience-drawing topic when it sees one, has been going all in with stories about people in the Sunapee area who think they've seen a mountain lion. The latest story came Monday and in a backhanded way it acknowledged that all these...
Old film of famous NH flight under a bridge
It was a highlight of the summer of 1979: a local pilot's daring flight under the huge railroad trestle that once spanned the Souhegan River in Greenville. Now, 40 years later, we can experience local inventor/pilot Bronson Potter's legendary feat, as motion picture...
Parts per trillion – trillion! – how can we even measure that?
New Hampshire has issued new proposed guidelines about allowable levels of a type of pollution in drinking water, which gives me an excuse to run this edited version of a 2016 column I wrote when the subject first came up: This has brought into regular discourse a...
Buy local company because it’s awesome; completely change it
The news that came out this week about Oracle moving Dyn's DNS service to the cloud will have an uncertain effect in Manchester - as the Union-Leader has reported, there have been some layoffs and, ominously, the company "was negotiating to extend its lease at 150 Dow...
‘Deepfake’ tech echoes old N.H. ruling on ‘morphed’ child porn pictures
As the technology becomes easier to use, our ability to believe any video is disappearing.
Getting broadband to rural areas remains a challenge
Tiny Chesterfield, N.H., as regular readers know, floated a loan so it could get fiber-to-the-home installed by Consolidated Communications, the local phone company. This isn't "municipal broadband: as the topic is often understood because the system is not open to...
Electric planes are real, maybe coming to Cape Cod
Not long ago everybody was saying that electric aviation is unfeasible for anything more than the smallest private planes because of weight-to-power limitations of batteries and electric engines. Maybe not. Cape Air, an independent regional airline that flies to...
Pollinator gardens are a hot topic
UNH research evaluating the relative attractiveness to pollinators of new varieties of old standards such as purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, a common garden perennial. Photo by Cathy Neal/UNH Pollinator gardens are a very hot topic - partly, I suspect, because...
Return to the Concord Monitor