Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
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...
I’ll see your Zeus and raise you a ‘fast negative breakdown’
(I seem to be a branch office of the UNH pressroom this week, but so be it: they've generated some interesting stuff.) From UNH News Service: In a first-of-its-kind observation, researchers from the University of New Hampshire Space Science Center have documented a...
Honeybees in hives get the attention but our wild bees are hurting, too
From UNH News Service: Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found a dramatic decline of 14 wild bee species that are, among other things, important across the Northeast for the pollination of major local crops like apples, blueberries and cranberries....
If you want to thwart crop pests, attack their enzymes
When I saw the press release about this research (here it is) I wasn't sure that I could make a column out of it, so I seized on the "big molecule" angle. Now that it's in print, I'm still not sure I can make a column out of it. But it's Tuesday - I had to file...
Mazel tov for MALDI-TOF to fight antibiotic resistance
I wrote recently about how human medicine and veterinary medicine are starting to share their efforts fighting the development of antibiotic-resistant disease. (Here is the piece) UNH sent out this item today about one of the main tools in that effort: By Lori Wright,...
Nowhere in New Hampshire is truly dark any more
Last week I saw a talk by Matt Marulla, former president of the New Hampshire Astronomical Society and a contributing author to the latest edition of The Oxford Astronomy Encyclopedia, about light pollution and the "dark sky" - really, lack thereof - phenomenon....
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