Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
What’s Twitter good for? Poop vs. dung
Twitter is mostly useless, but occasionally it's very useful, as I found out this week responding to a thread about dung beetles
Europe is afraid that our lobsters will mate with theirs
There's a fight between Maine and Scandinavia over whether live lobsters can be imported there for food - the Europeans are worried that they will escape and become an invasive species. The latest report from the Portland Press-Herald (this is a big issue in Maine, as...
Post offices photographs your letters – and they’ll email you the pictures
It’s not that I’m lazy, but there are days when I don’t make the 100-yard walk down my driveway to see what’s in the mailbox because – well, it’s 100 yards away. That’s like a dozen trips from the couch to the refrigerator. I don’t miss out, however, because the...
That documentary about NH’s most famous math discovery is out
The documentary about the twin-prime discovery by Yitang "Tom" Zhang, made when he was a lecturer at UNH in Durham, has been released. (I mentioned that it was coming a few months ago). Here are a few details, and the trailer. I'm working on getting it shown up here.
Granite Geek on the Air: The extreme-precipitation edition
I brought my dulcet tones to New Hampshire Public Radio yesterday, as I do most Tuesdays, to talk about my weekly column in The Monitor. This week's column is about a study by a Dartmouth researcher, among others, that looks at "extreme precipitation events' (more...
It’s time to geek out on interchange options for next phase of I-93 expansion
Interstate 93 through Concord is going to be expanded to three lane in each direction over the next decade or so, which means five very close-to-each-other interchanges will be reworked. Over the last three days, the Monitor has presented detailed options for three of...
An Archimedes screw is the secret of a Conn. slow-flow hydropower dam
You probably remember seeing the Archimedes Screw in a high school "simple machines" lesson - it has been used for millennia to raise water short distances as part of irrigation systems. New England Hydropower Co. of Beverly, Mass., has just opened a hydropower plant...
The sad end to Concord’s unique biomass district-heating system
Concord Steam, the company that has generated steam heat in the state's capitol city for eight decades, shut down Wednesday at midnight due to financial and technical issues. I had a look back at its tumultuous history in the Sunday Monitor (you can read it here) and...
What led Northeast precipitation to suddenly get more extreme in 1996?
From Dartmouth News Service: Over the past century, the Northeast has experienced an increase in the number of storms with extreme precipitation. A Dartmouth-led study finds that the increase in extreme Northeast storms occurred as an abrupt shift in 1996,...
Ranked-choice voting, approved by Maine ballot initiative, is unconstitutional
"Maine’s Constitution calls for candidates to be selected by plurality, in which the candidate with the most votes wins, even if the vote total is less than a majority." That sentence is at the heart of this Portland Press-Herald story, which details how that state's...
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