Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Put some ‘biofloc’ in a kiddie pool and become a shrimp farmer
The Boston Globe has a nice piece about UNH research into backyard shrimp farming, as a possible addition to the local-food movement. The shrimp can be cultivated in any larger container or tank, or even a backyard kiddie pool, at a relatively low cost. .... The...
Let’s boldly go into the future – as in, the Atlantic Time Zone
Once again there are efforts in the legislature to get away from Daylight Saving Time by moving us into the Atlantic Time Zone and dumping the twice-a-year clock shift. A bill (HB567) would do it for New Hampshire as long as Massachusetts and Maine also do it....
Should New Hampshire let an algorithm draw our political boundaries?
There's a bill before the state Legislature that would designate a "computer algorithm" to draw our political boundaries. It's similar to one introduce last year by the same legislator - I wrote about that effort one year ago. It went nowhere last year and probably...
Dartmouth will switch from oil-fired steam to wood-fired hot water for building heat
From Dartmouth News Service: Dartmouth is seeking proposals to build a biomass energy heating facility and transmission system to replace the existing central heating system. The new system, estimated to cost more than $200 million, will change how heat is produced...
Calm down: There’s no real answer to ‘who got the most snow in this storm?’
I use a snowboard (not the Flying Tomato kind) and specialized meteorology ruler and frankly, it’s still pretty much an estimate.
A two-sided solar panel is better than a one-sided one
They've rolled out a big solar canopy - solar panels over an outdoor parking lot - in Burlington, Vt., but what's interesting is that the 156 kW system has two-sided panels. (Here's an article describing that technology) From the press release: Encore Renewable Energy...
Which is safe enough: 1 ppm or 10 ppm? How do we know?
It sometimes seems that every chemical ever used in every product ever made turns out to be toxic, which we only realize after it has spread throughout the world and made people sick. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how toxic a chemical really is before we start using it?...
Stone walls can be found via LIDAR from above, crowd-sourcing from below
A combination of the aerial mapping using a system called LIDAR plus Internet-based crowd-sourcing may finally answer one of the most fascinating, if not very pressing, questions about the New Hampshire countryside: How many miles of stone walls do we have? “We want...
N.H. newspapers need Dan Brown to get mad at them on Twitter
Last week, Maine's best-known writer, Stephen King, got mad at the state's biggest newspaper through Twitter because it said it would stop buying freelance reviews of Maine-based books for its book page, instead relying on the national book reviews by AP that it...
UNH moved up to top tier of research universities
From UNH News Service: The University of New Hampshire has risen to the top echelon of research universities in the country as designated by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and is now among the 130 doctoral-granting universities in the...
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