Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
As ticks thrive in warmer winters, moose get sicker and sicker
New Hampshire is celebrating the lottery for its annual moose hunt, but I suspect there soon won't be any hunt because we won't have enough moose: The mortality rate of moose calves in New Hampshire this winter was a staggering 80 percent, due mostly to a warm winter...
Coyotes up, so fishers down, so porcupines up. (Nature is complicated)
Dave Anderson, the smooth-talking host of NHPR's "Something Wild" segments (who looks nothing like his voice - he has much more of the senior biker-dude vibe) has an interesting take on why there seem to be so many porcupines around today. He thinks the increase in...
New Hampshire’s own ‘Spam King’ – we know him as a Seacoast DJ – sentenced for phishing
Sanford Wallace was one of the early people who were famously bad on the Internet, by creating an email spam network in the late 1990s that earned him the name "Spam King" a.k.a. Spamford Wallace. But on the New Hampshire Seacoast, he was known for co-owning a bar...
Majority of engineering degrees at Dartmouth went to women – first time in the U.S. (maybe)
Dartmouth has an unusual engineering degree system - you get a BA in engineering, no majors/specialties unless you go to a 5th year - but even so, it's surprising that a majority (54%) of the 119 engineering BA's given out this year went to women. The school says this...
Vertical-axis windmills looks really cool. Too bad they stink at producing power
Wind turbines built around an upright axis, rather than the horizontal axis of a traditional three-blade turbine, look cool. They use all sorts of swoopy spiral-ish designs to grab wind on one side of the axis while not being pushed back by it on the other side....
Maine celebrates amazing dam removal and bypass on Penobscot River
Two big dam removals and a big river bypass around a third have made the Penobscot River in Maine accessible to salmon, alewife, shad, eels and other saltwater-to-freshwater fish for the first time in a century or more. (This one a major reason why the anadromous fish...
Dueling NHPR hosts wrangle about SpaceX getting to Mars by 2018 – with Phil Plait’s help
For years I've been reading Phil Plait, who became famous in 2002 for writing Bad Astronomy, a book debunking astronomy pseudoscience. He is entertaining and knowledgeable, a nice combination. So I was intrigued when two New Hampshire Public Radio hosts/producers went...
At Keene State, an accident with flatworms (flatworms?) has produced intriguing medical research
An error handling flatworms in a gen-ed biology class (about as far from research as college gets) has turned into an interesting project to create animal models for a series of rare but debilitating diseases. A perfect example of "fortune favors the prepared mind" as...
Testing of drugs is failing faster, which is good for pharmaceutical companies
Stat, the health publication of the Boston Globe, reports that the percentage of drug trials which made it to the market was 11 percent last year, the highest percentage in a long time. More judicious use of resources resulted in higher quality product pipelines...
A mica mine in New Hampshire is for sale – $2 million, cheap!
Know any I-have-more-money-than-I-know-what-to-do-with-it people? Here's the purchase for them: Ruggles Mine, which produced mica and other minerals for 160 years before being turned into a New England tourist attraction in 1963, is up for sale. The 235-acre property...
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