Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Check the windsock – lightning killed the airport weather station
It appears that a nearby lightning strike fried the electronics on the automated weather station at Concord airport last week, as I reported in the Monitor. It's waiting for specialty parts and won't be back up until later this week. In the meantime, pilots might need...
“Forever chemicals” are showing up in agriculture
The chemicals known collectively as PFAS - "forever chemicals" in some nomenclature because they don't really break down in the environment - are causing lots of headaches because they're showing up in groundwater. Turns out, they're showing up elsewhere, too, as...
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...
Return to the Concord Monitor