Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
It’s damp up here, but still a drought underground
Local media is finally getting back to other stories in the post-election days, and one of those is our drought - which is continuing, despite a relatively rainy month. The Uniobn-Leader and NHPR have had "we're still in a drought" stories and I'm putting one...
We’ve discovered a new prime number – not all news is bad
A new prime number has been discovered through a crowdsourced system - but it's not from the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Project, about which I have written often. This was found by Seventeen or Bust, a similar project to find Sierpinski numbers. I had never herd of...
Boston’s molasses flood was made worse by the weather
One of the most intriguing regional disasters of the past century - the Great Molasses Flood that killed 21 people in Boston's North End in 1919 after a 2 million-gallon storage tank burst - has gotten the attention of academics who were curious about why it was so...
Coal-to-wood switch at NH seacoast power plant took place 10 years ago
Ten years ago, then-PSNH began operating Northern Wood Power, replacing a 50-megawatt coal-burning boiler (one of three at the Schiller plant in Portsmouth) with one that burns wood chips and other wood byproducts, replacing some 130,000 tons of coal annually. I...
How do you keep track of tons of potentially toxic stuff?
Like all research universities, UNH receives, stores and disposes of lots and lots and lots of potentially nasty stuff - explosive, flammable, radioactive or corrosive - used for research and classes. And like all places with complicated inventories, UNH sometimes...
Oracle buys Dyn
Oracle Co. has been a big presence in Nashua for such a long time that it's located on Oracle Drive. Maybe they'll make a similar street in the Manchester Millyard, since Oracle has announced it will buy Dyn, the state's highest-flying tech firm, for somewhere around ...
The Mirai botnet is “evolving” (not the biological metaphor I wanted to hear)
Dyn has not issued anything new on the Oct. 21 DDOS attack that clogged it up and took down some major customers, including Twitter - specifically, who did the attack and why. (Their most recent public report was Oct. 26 on the company blog.) Meanwhile, the Mirai...
Latest sign of a hostile online world: Wikipedia sets up two-factor authentication
Wikipedia has had to change its philosophy (delightfully forward-looking or pitifully naive, depending on your point of view) to cope with the reality of human beings.
Tonight: Science Cafe Concord discusses 3-D printing
Our last Science Cafe before the December break is tonight in Concord. The topic? 3-D printing: It was the next big thing a couple of years ago, with visions of a world where we could print out most of our worldly goods on demand, and then it faded out of view. Two...
Hey, good news! China uses less coal & global CO2 emissions have flattened
How about a bit of good environmental news? Global CO2 emissions has flattened over the past couple of years, largely because China has cut back on its use of coal: The study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, says global CO2 emissions from fossil...
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