Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Highest high temperatures are bad, but highest low temperatures might be worse
This is my column, which ran Tuesday July 10 in the Monitor. By coincidence (or, rather, because multiple reporters get story ideas from obvious phenomena like a wicked bad heat wave) a couple of major outlets ran similar analysis later in the week, including Inside...
Tech history nerds: Concord had one of the first examples of three-phase industrial power!
Sewalls Falls Recreation Area in north Concord is a lovely spot along the Merrimack River that includes some big, decaying industrial buildings, old cement walls and weird piles of rock in the river. It's all the result of the area's history as a pre-World War I...
‘Hagfish slime, which has been described as the grossest super-material in existence’
By Sarah Schaier, UNH| Hagfish slime, which has been described as the grossest super-material in existence, might be one of the most unique biomaterials known known to humankind — and UNH scientist and assistant professor David Plachetzkihas received a grant from the...
Pay for parking in Nashua via an app (at 32 cents a pop)
Nashua is launching a pay-for-parking-via-app system, as reported in the Nashua Telegraph: Starting on Main Street, small decals with a four-digit number will be affixed to the meters at all of the roughly 900 spots, moving outward to the other parking zones during...
Driverless car testing in NH vetoed by governor, leaving us in autonomous limbo
UPDATE JULY 8: Ethan DeWitt has a followup analysis which says that in theory this leaves NH open to any and all autonomous car testing, since we have no laws addressing them at all. Read it here. A fatal crash involving a self-driving car in Arizona was one of the...
I used to call our refrigerator an ‘ice box’ – here’s a real-world example
I have a story in the Monitor today about a program at a Rockywold-Deephaven Camps in Holderness that uses ice blocks, cut from Squam Lake in January, to keep food cold in "ice boxes". You should check it out because it's got great photos of hauling 110-pound blocks...
Despite reports, potato chip bags are not Faraday cages
One of my favorite stories of recent weeks involved an electrician who wanted to goof off but whose whereabouts were monitored by management via his GPS. He couldn't turn it off because they'd know, so instead he stuck inside one of those shiny foil potato chip bags,...
Highest low temperature – signature of a warming planet
We all fixate on record high temperatures for a given location and time, and understandably so, but just as significant, certainly in terms of human health and also in terms of reflecting the climate's changes, is highest low temperature for a given period. A case in...
Dropping trout from helicopters has become part of the natural process
In this era of concern about invasive species, people spend a lot of time and effort warning against moving plants and animals around too much. Except for trout. We move them around like crazy. Last week the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department completed aerial...
If you want to help pollinators in New Hampshire, what should you plant?
Lots of people, including me, have become interested in helping insects that pollinate our crops, but it's not easy to know what to plant. Here comes UNH News Service to the rescue: Scientists with the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of...
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