Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire

The mystery of the “taxidermied bear”
New Hampshire Public Radio has a good story about the ongoing problem of bears interacting with people in New Hampshire - read/hear it here - and they included a database of bear nuisance reports to New Hampshire Fish and Game over four years. The causes were clumped...

Grow kale on Mars? Dartmouth students say: You bet!
Dartmouth engineering students will head to NASA’s Langley Research Center soon to pitch a Mars greenhouse concept that has the potential to grow enough crops to sustain a small human colony. As one of five finalists for NASA’s 2019 Breakthrough, Innovative, and...
Vermont’s utility wants to go all carbon-free and renewable, and pretty soon
Green Mountain Power, the utility that covers most of Vermont, has joined the ranks of utilities like Xcel Energy that are working toward 100 percent carbon-free electricity. It said it will target 100 percent carbon-free by 2025 and 100 percent renewables by 2030. To...

Sometimes lightning *prefers* to strike twice in the same place
(Yes, this is another post about UNH research involving lightning. But it's different research!) Joe Dwyer, a physics professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Space Science Center who is known for his lightning research, helped to interpret data in a new study...

My taste buds vs. a non-meat burger. Let the battle begin.
(In the original version of the story I called the restaurant 603Grill instead of Grill603 ... <slaps forehead, pounds head on desk>) In the name of saving the planet, I ate two burgers on Saturday. No sacrifice is too great for journalism. One burger was, well,...
Our population is stagnant, so how come the housing market is tight?
One of the great advantages of my job is that I sometimes get paid to answer questions which bug me. This article, which ran in Sunday's Concord Monitor, is an example: The arrival of springtime means the start of the busy season for housing sales, but to some extent,...

People are smarter about culverts than I thought
Last week I wrote a story about a culvert that collapsed in the city of Concord. As part of discussion with General Services, the generically-named city body that includes the street department, I asked a question: How many culverts does Concord have? A confession: I...

Mowing less to help bees doesn’t necessarily also help ticks
As I have noted before, research indicates that mowing your yard every other week instead of every week can help native pollinators and bees. But I also noted that this goes against advice to reduce tick populations in your yard, because ticks like longer grass...
Tiny house take a tiny – really tiny – step forward in N.H.
Fans of tiny houses will have to wait longer to see if New Hampshire lawmakers will embrace them, as a bill to ease approval of the structures is going to a study committee. The state Senate Election Law and Municipal Affairs Committee on Wednesday approved a bill...
Small N.H. town & phone company building fiber-to-the-home for everybody
(Note to print readers of the Monitor: Yes, the story in print said "1200 band modem" - I'll have to blame that one on an editor who's probably too young to remember when modem speeds were a topic of conversation.)(I can't be too critical; when I posted this piece...