Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
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...
Discovery Center looks at the most distant flyby humans have ever achieved
If you want to learn more about that NASA exploration of the deepest deep-space object ever seen closeup, check the McAuliffe Shepard Discovery Center's show “To Pluto and Beyond - New Horizons Visits Ultima Thule”. The presentation will be Friday Feb. 1 at 7 p.m.,...
That cool gasholder building in Concord is in big trouble
In 2016 I got to tour inside the iconic gasholder building in Concord, a handsome circular brick structure that once held gas made from coal that was used for lighting and heat in the city, in the days before natural gas pipelines showed up here. (Here's that story,...
If you’re savvy about teletypes (yes, teletypes) the Aviation Museum of N.H. wants you
ne of the mysteries of life for those of us who have achieved a certain age is why airplanes aren’t exciting any more. “This was like Silicon Valley, it was the hot technology,” is how Jeff Rapsis, the new executive director of the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire,...
Global hackathon for games coming to Concord again
From NHTI, the community college in Concord: The weekend of January 25-27, 2019, teams of programmers, artists and musicians will gather at NHTI to take part in Global Game Jam (GGJ), a worldwide game development event. Held simultaneously at over 800 hundred sites...
Composting at scale is hard
Everybody agrees that composting food waste is a no-brainer - it creates useful soil-enhancing product and doesn't take up landfill space. But actually collecting all the little bits of food that are discarded from kitchens and cafeterias all over the place, not to...
Renewables boom hurts Vt. utility that bet big on renewables
Vermont Public Radio reported on a counter-intuitive situation in that state which reflects how complicated energy markets are: (The whole story is here) Washington Electric Co-op, a small member-owned utility based in East Montpelier, Vermont, sells energy credits...
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