Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
N.H. gets a pittance from settlement over Lenovo spyware that used man-in-the-middle attack
New Hampshire will receive more than $50,000 as the result of a settlement with the company Lenovo for selling laptops loaded with advertising software that could snoop on owners’ web surfing, which created a security hole that left the machines vulnerable to hackers....
I got to write a story with “death ray” in the lede! (It’s about a local company that makes laser safety equipment)
If you want to get overly dramatic about it, you could say that Kentek, a company that has been in Pittsfield for 34 years, is in the business of protecting us from death rays. “A laser basically evaporates materials, melts them. That’s how it drills,” explained Tom...
Maybe it’s a digital-info world – but at the library it’s still very analog
I wrote a story about the Concord city library adding a second digital service - Hoopla Digital to supplement the statewide New Hampshire Downloadable Books service operated by the firm OverDrive - and it was interesting to report, but to me the biggest fact was this:...
My mother’s dad grew table grapes in California in the 1940s; maybe I can grow them in NH in the 2010s
From UNH News Service: University of New Hampshire researchers have found certain varieties of seedless table grapes grow better in New Hampshire’s colder climate than others. The research project, funded by the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station, aims to...
Bad year for piping plovers on N.H. beaches
From New Hampshire Fish and Game: It was a difficult summer for the state-endangered and federally threatened piping plovers on Hampton and Seabrook beaches this year. This summer, three pairs nested on Hampton Beach with two chicks fledged (25+ days old), while on...
No N.H. entrants in annual design-a-better-wood-stove competition
There's a Massachusetts firm among the 14 wannabe finalists for the 2018 Wood Stove Design Challenge, but nobody from New Hampshire made the list. The competition is a sort of mini X-Prize-ish attempt to push innovation in an area that doesn't get a lot of geeky...
Today is the anniversary of the first motorized Mt. Washington ascent – in a steam-powered car
From Crispin Battles, Marketing Director for the Mt. Washington Auto Road: Completed in 1861, the road to the summit the Northeast's highest mountain was originally referred to as the Mt. Washington Carriage Road. Motorized vehicles were still several decades away...
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...
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