Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Science is a human activity with human problems – and humans can suggest solutions
Vox is a site that says its role is to "explain the news," an attempt to make a virtue of necessity (it doesn't hire enough reporters, so it has to wait for others to find news and then swoop in to claim a piece). Happily, its swooping is often quite good - its...
Slimy stuff on your pond? This is a job for BloomWatch!
Algae blooms turning ponds into a gloppy mess has become, distressingly, routine news. That's why the EPA has launched a citizen-science project in which you can use your smartphone to document the problem - or, if you're really interested, get a microscope and delve...
Football games are bad for telephone poles
I'm doing a story about utility poles (which I, like you, still call "telephone poles" even though the electric company owns at least half of them) - and here's the most entertaining quote I've heard so far: "After the first Patriots pre-season game, we had four...
Granite Geek On The Air: The makerspace-in-school edition
Once I started reading transcripts of my weekly chats with NHPR's Peter Biello, I sympathized much more with fumble-tongued politicians. Boy, do I sound dumb. You can see how dumb I sound here, as we discuss a new makerspace opening in a New Hampshire middle...
Fentanyl is so dangerous a drug that even the “dark web” is getting scared
Motherboard has a startling piece about a well-known (in certain circles) dark web marketplace - one of a number of online sites where illegal material and services are bought and sold - has banned listings of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has been linked to...
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...
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