Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
The most exotic automotive technology these days is a stick shift
My wife and I have two manual-transmission cars (although one of them is about to die due to body rust, just short of 250,000 miles). Increasingly, this means nobody can borrow them because fewer people learn, or remember, how to drive a manual transmission: "Drive a...
Harvey dumped 5 times as much as rain as the all-time record for Concord
Over a period of three to four days, Hurricane Harvey has dumped more than 45 inches of rain over large swaths of Texas. That’s a staggering number, and it led one reader to call the newsroom with a question: What would happen if that much rain fell on Concord?...
Internet of Tomatoes – now *that* is an IoT
You’ve heard, of course, about the Internet of Things plenty of times in this column. Maybe it’s time for a different IoT: the Internet of Tomatoes. “About 88 percent of farms around the U.S. are small and medium size, and of those, nearly 100 percent have no...
New Hampshire’s science cafes are starting up again
September is almost here, which means New Hampshire is about to resume its title as The Science Cafe Capitol of the Western Hemisphere after a summer hiatus. Science Cafe New Hampshire is well into its sixth year in Nashua and Concord, while the...
A hefty $300,000 is available for startups in the tripled-in-size TechOut event
The New Hampshire High Tech Council has opened the application period for its annual TechOut event, a startup competition aimed at enhancing the New Hampshire tech ecosystem by awarding investment capital to young startups. Now in its sixth year, the 2017 TechOut...
The eclipse was a blip, but a noticeable one, for New England solar power
ISO New England, the folks who run the six-stage power grid, says the solar eclipse removed about 700 MW of solar power, or roughly a third of total PV output, at its height. That's not musch out of total production by all power plants of almost 20,000 MW. This is...
AAA says total cost of owning an electric car is same as owning a mid-sized sedan
The American Automobile Association, which calls itself just AAA these days, has released its annual "total cost of ownership" study for various types of vehicles, tallying up not just the purchase price but also maintenance and repair, depreciation and fuel....
Can cross-breeding, using a boost from genetic information, give New Hampshire its own quinoa?
I followed up this week on a press release that Granite Geek printed last week concerning UNH research seeking to develop a variant of quinoa which can grow in New Hampshire. Regardless of your opinion of hipsters' favorite grain (quinoa is pretty good, if you ignore...
Do you know what the Spruce Goose was? Somebody in our governor’s office does
There's a tussle going on between the governor and the Fish and Game Commission over whether the state should build a public boat launch on Lake Sunapee at a site known as Wild Goose. Gov. Chris Sununu says no, and as part of the recent back-and-forth, his office sent...
Disqus says Vermont online comments are the most “toxic” in the U.S., and New Hampshire the least toxic
In a conclusion that goes against every state-personality stereotype you can imagine, an analysis of comments posted via the Disqus software, which is used by many but far from all websites, claims that one out of every eight comments posted from Vermont is "toxic" -...
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