Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Sierra Leona and Chile “What are the roundest and least round countries, Alex?”
I'm preparing some future columns, including one on the surprisingly interesting question of the length of New Hampshire's coastline, so I was delighted to spot, via BoingBoing, a sort-of-related analysis about which countries in the world are the most and least round...
Mexico village uses fireflies to lure tourists, and thus avoid logging
This week I wrote about the appeal of fireflies in my Monitor column - and talked about it with Peter Biello of NHPR - so I was delighted to see a story in the Guardian about how a rural cooperative in Mexico is using them as a lure to tourists, which makes them...
Internet trolls get worse, not better, when they lose anonymity
Like many people, I've long thought that getting rid of anonymity is a way to improve online discourse. If people know that it's actually me who is responding to somebody then I'm less likely to call them a dunderhead, or so the thinking goes. The thinking, alas, may...
Blockchain isn’t going to show up in Vermont government any time soon
There's a great bit of tech nostalgia in the Burlington Free-Press's story today about why Vermont agencies haven't started using blockchain for government documents, as is allowed under a unique state law: As recently as this year, the Secretary of State's office was...
Are firefly populations crashing? We don’t know – but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry
I've heard a lot of news reports in the past few months that say firefly populations are crashing, like honeybees are, so I figured I'd check into it for my Monitor column. The answer, according to Tufts University biology professor Sarah Lewis (she's literally...
Certainty about NH mountain lions shows why humans are always arguing
There's an interesting quote in a Concord Monitor story today about people who are sure they have seen mountain lions in New Hampshire, from a woman responding to New Hampshire Fish & Game's desire for actual evidence before they agree that animals which haven't...
Can you raise livestock in the woods? UNH is experimenting
By UNH News Service: Seeing cows graze in a forest may be an uncommon site in New England but at the Organic Dairy Research Farm at the University of New Hampshire, heifers soon will be dining among the trees. Researchers with the NH Agricultural Experiment Station...
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...
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