Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Grid operators in New England & New York link up
Some important stories are really boring, and it's to get much duller than "electric grid operators in New England and New York take steps to coordinate their operations" - but the news is actually pretty important. The press release by ISO-New England, which is...
Vermont Yankee can move spent fuel to dry storage sooner than planned
Spent nuclear fuel - material that no longer releases enough of the right sort of energy to sustain a reaction in a power plant - is a pain in the neck. It has to be stored until its no longer dangerous, which takes hundreds or thousands of years, but nobody wants it...
To fight climate change, follow the newly invested money
Perhaps the biggest thing to come out of the Paris talks on fighting climate change, carrying the incredibly forgettable name of COP21, was the interest in and push by private business to invest in clean energy and greenhouse-gas-opposing technologies - as I noted in...
Survey of the year: NH leads US in fajitas-vs-orgasms
Online surveys are, of course, baloney, but some are more entertaining baloney than others. At the top of the entertaining list has to be the analyzed results of this survey by people who signed up for Eight Sensible Gifts for Hannukah from the folks who make the...
UNH rocket examines ‘upwelling’ that (among other things) snags satellites
By David Sims, UNH News Service: A team of scientists led by Marc Lessard of the University of New Hampshire Space Science Center launched an instrument-laden, four-stage sounding rocket from Norway's Andøya Space Center about 280 miles above Earth to study how...
‘Biosimilar’ generic drugs – made via biology, not chemistry
Boston Business Journal has a story today about a Woburn, Mass., company called Blue Stream Labs that is expanding as it works to develop something I had never heard of: "Biosimilar" generic drugs: Unlike making a generic of a small-molecule (or pill-based) drug,...
Why do headlights look like light sabers in this drone photo?
David Vogt, a professional photographer, took the above gorgeous photo of the Milford Oval, my favorite town center in New Hampshire*, with a drone. It's a fabulous shot; I love it ... but I'm puzzled. Look at the four cars in the left hand side of the picture. They...
America’s Stonehenge – steeped in history, but what kind of history?
This is a sidebar to a feature package I wrote for Sunday's Monitor about winter solstice celebration at America's Stonehenge - I thought it would be the piece of most interest to GraniteGeek readers: Fans of America’s Stonehenge will tell you that the site predates...
GraniteGeek on the Air – the nega-watt edition
My weekly chat with Peter Biello at NHPR concerned, as it usually does, my Monitor column - in this case, about pricing for energy efficiency and how putting a dollar figure on the nega-watt is good for megawatts. You can listen (or read the transcript, which makes...
Sayonara, printed white pages
Printed telephone directories are, for obvious reasons, on the way out. Yellow pages and business listings still make money but white pages - residential listings - don't. FairPoint, the phone company in New Hampshire, announced last spring that it would stop...
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