Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Walmart is selling oddball-looking potatoes and apples – hooray!
When NH Public Radio's Peter Biello asked me, in our weekly chat, whether I thought stores would start selling "ugly fruit" - produce that doesn't look perfect - I said not a chance. We were talking about my Monitor column, which discussed the huge amount of food...
Vermont (with its perpetual sunshine?) is No. 7 in per-person solar power
Ten states – Nevada, Hawaii, California, Arizona, North Carolina, New Jersey, Vermont, New Mexico, Massachusetts and Colorado – accounted for 88 percent of U.S. solar capacity at the end of 2015 (but only 26 percent of the country’s population), according to a new...
Boston firm tries to improve crops via … well, the plant version of probiotics
Genetic modification to improve crop yields is a good idea, but it's far from the only good idea in that field. A Boston area firm called Indigo Agriculture just got $100 million in funding for its efforts to improve yields in sort of the same way people try to...
The only downtown-wide steam heat system in NH is closing
Concord Steam, which burns wood chips to provide steam heat for 96 buildings in downtown Concord, including much of the state government office complex, has been struggling with financial and technical issues for years - and today it threw in the towel. If the state...
Gold leaf so thin you can blow it away is making the State House dome shiny again
Much to my irritation, I haven't been allowed up on the scaffolding surrounding the State House dome as they regild it (something about safety - pfffft!) but I did get a chance to talk to the foreman of the crew doing the work and to see what gold leaf looks like up...
Exercise works at least as well as surgery on common knee problem – doggone it
The problem with evidence-based medicine - with evidence-based anything - is that sometimes the evidence doesn't point where you want it to. Consider a study "to determine if exercise therapy is superior to arthroscopic partial meniscectomy for knee function in middle...
NH gets thumbs up for commercial energy storage from analyst
An analyst of energy storage systems at Greentech Media (my favorite news source for solar/alt-energy information) has listed five "surprising" states where commercial energy storage is doing well or likely to do well, to go along with obvious states like California...
The not-so-pretty consequences of our love of pretty produce
America wastes at least a third, and maybe even half, of the food we grow for human consumption, and a big reason is that you and I and other consumers won't buy vegetables and fruit unless they look perfect. There's even a small push to sell "oddball produce" or...
Pokemon Go’s crowdsourced origins are reflected in lack of “gyms” in black or poor areas
When virtual becomes virtual reality, reality's problems come along for the ride. That's why Pokemon Go, the charming and delightful virtual-reality game that is sweeping the world, has inadvertently reflected the nasty way we humans separate ourselves into different...
At UNH, cows send a text when they go into labor (and it’s not over-sharing)
BY Lori Wright, UNH News Service: It’s the middle of the night, and University of New Hampshire doctoral student Kayla Aragona has just received a text alert at home on her cell phone from a cow in labor at the Fairchild Dairy Teaching and Research Center. A sensor –...
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