Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Bird poop strikes again, knocking out a nuclear power plant
Bird poop conducts electricity much better than mammal poop, because bird anatomy mixes poop and pee together, combining salts and liquids that are mostly separated by the digestive systems of non-feathered folks. (Telling your little brother to urinate on a live...
As the man behind ‘@’ dies, a reminder that Boston’s BBN was key to the birth of the Internet
Silicon Valley gets most of the credit for creating the online world, but the engineering-consulting firm / MIT spinoff Bolt Beranek and Newman in Boston, a.k.a. BBN, was one of the main driving forces in the development of ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet....
Bitcoin network reaches capacity, transactions slow to a crawl
Bitcoin has a scale problem - it's growing too fast for its underlying mechanism to handle. The Verge reports "The average time to confirm a transaction has ballooned from 10 minutes to 43 minutes. Users are left confused and shops that once accepted Bitcoin are...
Mosquitoes almost eliminated from Pacific Island by sterile-bug releases
Stat, the medical/biotech specialty publication of the Boston Globe, has a good long piece about efforts to entirely eliminate mosquitoes from a small Pacific island via the release of sterile males infected with a natural bacteria that interferes with the bugs'...
Guess which Monitor story was put on Reddit?
Sex, crime and gambling are good clickbait, but nothing beats unnatural relationships between man and beast. (The number was much higher yesterday, closer to the publication date - 78,000+)
AAA (which depends on drivers) says 75% of people “afraid” of self-driving cars
AAA conducted a survey of its members and says that "three out of four U.S. drivers report feeling “afraid” to ride in a self-driving car." Here's the press release. Since a switch to self-driving cars would probably decimate membership (in literal and figurative...
Rounding to nearest integer fools NY Times into thinking NH blew GOP delegate count
A NY Times column/blog called The Upshot has accused New Hampshire of giving Marco Rubio one too few delegates after the GOP primary, but as I discuss in the Concord Monitor today, they're wrong. They misinterpreted the confusingly worded state law which says how...
How many Leap Day Babies live in NH? Get the back of an envelope, quick!
I have a pleasant little feature story in the Monitor today about a Leap Day Baby born in Concord, which includes a little back-of-envelope calculation about how many such people live in New Hampshire: Since there is one Feb. 29 every 1,461 days – with slight...
Science Cafe Concord to discuss the scientific process that can change your life the most
Here's an advance look at my column which will run in tomorrow's Concord Monitor and Nashua Telegraph - maybe it will prod you into attending Tuesday's Science Cafe Concord - 6 p.m. at The Draft Sports Bar. Free, of course. CRISPR and its ramifications are more likely...
UN says pollinators are in trouble – but we knew that already
The United Nations has issued a warning that the worldwide loss of natural pollinators like native bees, flies and butterflies, above the troubles facing honeybees, is posing yet another threat to global food supply. But we knew that: UNH sponsored a "pollinators in...
Return to the Concord Monitor