Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
N.H.’s best themed Christmas tree is at the Aviation Museum
Who needs tinsel or strings of popcorn when you've got airsickness bags from airlines around the world for decoration? They think so at the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire, next to the main runway of Manchester-Boston Regional Airport.
Dartmouth College goes all-in with A.I.
Dartmouth, the school where the term "artificial intelligence" was first put forward seven decades ago, is going ahead gung-ho with LLM et al through what it calls an "A.I. Partnership With Anthropic and AWS" (Amazon Web Services). Their announcement (here) says:...
What do you do with a gazillion pounds of contaminated soil?
There are three ways of dealing with soils that have been contaminated by years of people and companies dumping toxin crud underground, the old "out of sight, out of mind" mentality. They are: Clean up the soil (often by baking it) and keep it there, which is...
You know about A.I. slop – well, crypto is finance slop
When the state announced plans recently to launch the first-ever municipal bond backed by bitcoin, the news exposed a big hole in my knowledge base. Bitcoin isn’t the problem; it was the bond part that baffled me. I know about chemical bonds, town-meeting bonds to buy...
Winter has gotten 8 degrees F warmer in Burlington in my lifetime
Winter has warmed a staggering 8 degrees Fahrenheit in Burlington, Vermont, between 1970 and 2025. That's the most of 244 U.S. cities analyzed in a new report from Climate Central, a climate research group. Winters have gotten warmer in 98% of those cities. The effect...
Testing whether mushrooms can clean up PFAS
A Plymouth State grad who lives in Merrimack is running her own test, with state approval, of whether mushrooms can help clean up some of the PFAS around the closed Saint Gobain factory. New Hampshire Bulletin has a story (here it is): "The pilot will focus on one...
How many satellites (including UNH’s) can you fit in one rocket?
The SpaceX rocket carrying a partly-UNH-built cubesat launched successfully Nov. 28. The photo above shows the various satellites crammed inside the rocket. Here's part of a UNH write-up on the satellite: A team of 70 undergraduate students from the University of New...
N.H. patents through Nov. 30
Links to each patent can be found here, using the patent number or inventor’s name.) By Targeted News Service WASHINGTON – The following federal patents were assigned in New Hampshire through Nov. 3o. *** Apparatus and Method for Detecting Disconnection of an...
Doctors need to think about climate change when advising parents
Sorry to be such a downer on a holiday week. This column was going to be more upbeat but then I started writing it. As if parents didn’t have enough to think about when it comes to their kids’ health, some knowledgeable folks would like them to consider one more...
UNH dementia care robot enters home testing
I like this story from UNH Today because it doesn't oversell the project, emphasizing the ongoing nature of testing that's needed. That seems to be lacking from a lot of tech releases these days. By Aaron Sanborn, UNH Today: A multi-year effort to develop and test a...
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