Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
On a sunny day, solar produces 10% of Vermont’s electricity – which can sometimes be a problem
Vermont Public Radio has an excellent piece (right here) about the benefits and complications that solar power is bringing to that state, and to the New England grid as some states such as Vermont and Massachusetts charge on the solar bandwagon and others, including...
If there’s a public makerspace involved, you might want to go back to middle school
A public makerspace is being opened in a couple weeks in the town of Amherst. Not so exciting, perhaps, except that its location is very unusual, if not unique: It's in Amherst Middle School, making use of the art room/computer room/wood shop/etc. which sit empty much...
Massachusetts isn’t New Hampshire, so why do we let them use our time zone?
I saw a story in Bloomberg News today that an economic development bill in Massachusetts includes a provision to study whether Massachusetts should move to the Atlantic Standard Time zone without daylight savings - basically the equivalent of dropping the annual...
Even as vaccines=autism myth fades away, more parents skip kids’ vaccines
Stat, the Boston Globe's health/biotech publication, has a distributing story about a continuing increase in pediatricians saying they have encountered parents who don't want their kids to have vaccines - even though there has been a decline in the percentage who cite...
Wild boars in New Hampshire – a ‘rototiller’ of an invasive species
New Hampshire has a lot of annoying and expensive and destructive invasive species, but at least we don't have the feral pigs that are digging up the South. Or do we? The Monitor has a great story (read it here) about the return of a mounted wild-boar head to...
Non-hydropower renewable energy is almost 10% of US electricity production
In the first half of 2016, renewable energy other than hydropower - meaning wind power, solar power (including distributed, rooftop stuff), geothermal and biomass - produced a whopping 9.2 percent of all U.S. electricity production. That's not chicken feed, folks. And...
Rabies vaccine scattered around the north woods, so don’t eat funny-looking packets
We don't think about rabies much in this country, but it's out there. The disease tends to pass through wild populations of animals in waves, mostly commonly affecting foxes, raccoons, skunks and bats. On the East Coast, as is shown by this CDC map, raccoons are the...
Granite Geek on the air: Riding the RGGI roundabout
My weekly chat with Peter Biello at NHPR discussed the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which turned 10 this month (depending on what year you choose for its start). You can listen to it here, or read my Monitor column on the topic (complete with Archie comics...
Among the plants proudly on display at the Oregon State Fair: Cannabis
In my lifetime, several astonishing things have happened that I never would have predicted as a child: The collapse of communism, the end of public smoking in the US, the fall in global birth rates. Here's another one: Among the prize-winning tomatoes and carrots and...
Why are the White Mountains a national forest, not a national park – and does it matter?
Today's the centennial of the National Park Service, which is one of the great things that America has accomplished (we basically got the idea going and plenty of other countries, thankfully, have followed suit). The Monitor has an interesting localizer - a story that...
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