Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Origami is awesome & math-y origami is awesomer – at PSU museum
The father-son team of mathematician/artists Erik Demaine (famous for his mathematical origami) and Martin Demaine will give a talk and hands-on presentation at the Museum of the White Mountains at Plymouth State University from 3:30 to 5 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 16, in...
NH House: If Mass. goes to Atlantic time zone, we will too
The New Hampshire House of Representatives has supported a bill that says New Hampshire will shift to the Atlantic Time Zone, dumping daylight savings, if Massachusetts does it first. Here is the Union-Leader story. I reported on this bill a couple of weeks ago and...
The beauty of solar power, the “ugliness” of solar panels
Great story in the Monitor today from Nick Reid, who takes a pretty routine zoning case about solar panels next to a church and reflects the whole debate over neighborhood character, renewable energy and how we make choices. Just go ahead and read it here.
Politics is a mess – maybe software can do it better (at least the redistricting)
The geekiest bill before the New Hampshire legislature this year has to be HB320, which would take the process of redistricting (redrawing boundaries for legislators and senators) away from humans and give it to optimization software in an attempt to avoid the partisan wrangling that has helped bring governance to a halt in America.
Even handguns are modular these days – that’s why NH got the big Army contract
There are technical reasons many shooters like the P320 from Sig Sauer in Newington, which won an Army contract that could be worth half a billion dollars. It doesn’t have an external hammer like the P229R and the Beretta M9, the handgun that it replaces for the Army,...
White Mountains are home to 140 native bee species
By Lori Wright, UNH: The White Mountain National Forest is home to nearly 140 species of native bees, including two species of native bumble bees that are in decline in the Northeast, according to researchers with the NH Agricultural Experiment Station who recently...
Opioid use may be contributing to an alarming outbreak of amnesia in Massachusetts
From Stat News: Public health officials on Thursday said they had detected a bizarre cluster of cases in which patients in Massachusetts developed amnesia over the past few years — a highly unusual syndrome that could be connected to opioid use. The officials have...
Who should decide on school vaccines – citizen legislators or health professionals?
The bill is being made in the name of openness rather than limiting vaccinations, but the people who spoke in its favor at a subcommittee hearing described vaccines as the dangerous product of pharmaceutical greed, physicians who are misled or chasing profit, and regulators who are in industry’s back pocket.
Is the “January thaw” a real thing? Mount Washington Observatory crunches the numbers
Everybody in New England – by which I mean me and people I know – has heard of the “January thaw”. This is the expectation that during the middle of this month, temperatures will rise above freezing long enough that skiers will get grumpy and everybody else will notice.
What my ski helmet needs is better chiral auxetic cellular solids
Material science has always seemed to me like a dull subject – “hey, kids, let’s make better cement!” – but technological changes have increased its importance, especially for 3D printing, and really seem to have livened it up. Yet another fascinating tech topic that I know too little about!
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