Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Could NH’s coal-fired power plant switch to partly burning wood?
It would be good for the planet but bad for New England's grid if we shut down Merrimack Station, the 465-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Bow, N.H. We're losing so many baseload power plants - coal-fired and nuclear - that it's getting to be a little dicey keeping...
Engineers use objective (well – mostly objective) methods to choose bridges to fix
New Hampshire has eight engineers with the Department of Transportation who inspect our 3,846 bridges, each of them at least once every two years. How do they decide which ones to fix? Good question - which is why I looked into it in my column this week. You can read...
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.
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