Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Come see (& talk about) a movie concerning the most surprising math in NH history
As promised last week, I'm hosting a talk next Tuesday (Sept. 26) after a showing of "Counting From Infinity" - here's my column from the Monitor discussing it: No matter how many bar arguments you’ve been involved in, I’ll bet you’ve never heard one around the...
Watch the video of Science Cafe about regenerative medicine & ARMI in Manchester
Concord TV, the community access channel in the state capitol, films each month's Science Cafe Concord and puts it online. They share the file with other community-access channels across the country and tell me that lots of other stations rebroadcast it. We seem to be...
Changes in daylight, changes in temperature – it’s leaf-peeping time!
It's pretty much de rigueur for New England news outlets to run some sort of "ever wonder why leaves change color each fall?" story each fall. Since this is a blog, I don't have to write it - I can steal it! There are plenty of places to swipe from; I like the...
Alas, the hemlock wooly adelgid shrugged off the “polar vortex”
There are a lot of insect pests that don't thrive in New Hampshire because of our cold winters. Our winters are getting less cold, or at least less long, and some of them are sneaking north with dire consequences. One of those is the hemlock wooly adelgid, which has...
Coal is rarely used to produce power in N.E. – oil, virtually never
The above clip is taken from the draft Regional System Plan from ISO-New England, the folks who run the six-state power grid. There's a big conference in Boston today discussing the issue of how to deal with all the changes - mostly the growth of solar/wind and the...
New type of pituitary cell found in lampreys at UNH
By UNH News Service: Discovering a new type of cell is a remarkable accomplishment for any scientists. Tim Marquis, who graduated in 2015 with his bachelor’s degree in biomedical science from the University of New Hampshire, can check that off his bucket list....
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...
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