Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
How carbon-neutral is biomass energy? It’s complicated
It's obvious that burning trees for heat or to create electricity is better from a greenhouse-gas point of view than burning coal and oil, because the trees can regrow and pull back the the carbon they released into the air. Or maybe it's not so obvious, reports...
Another record for this yuck of a winter: Earliest ice-out
The Union-Leader reports "Ice-Out on Lake Winnipesaukee is imminent, which means the winter of 2016 will likely have the earliest such call since records have been kept." This follows what is probably the latest-ever call of "Ice-In", which only happened in February....
Watching a live-stream falcon webcam is soothing, except for the sex
They're started live-streaming a webcam from a peregrine falcon nest in Manchester (here's the site; it points to two different cameras on the same location) and I'm addicted. I'm not addicted because I'm a bird fanatic, but because the wind going over the microphones...
Concord’s cool gasholder building is slowly crumbling
There's a really neat round brick building in Concord that once held coal gas or "manufactured gas," the predecessor to natural gas that was made by processing coal. It has been abandoned for decades and is slowly falling apart - an entranceway recently collapsed, as...
World’s economy is growing but power carbon emissions aren’t – that’s very, very important
As the Washington Post notes in this article, the International Energy Agency says that global economic growth has become "decoupled" from greenhouse gas emissions from the use of energy (their largest source) - that is, the economy grew but emissions didn't....
Research that includes “guano” has to be interesting
I'm doing an interview soon for my next column, concerning DNA analysis of bat poop. With bats, however, you get to call it "guano", which sounds much more sophisticated. The above screenshot from the website of Jeff Foster's lab at UNH reflects an admirable focus. No...
New Hampshire has nation’s second-lowest rate of clicking online ads
According to AdRoll, an ad-tech company that counts 25,000 advertisers and reaches 1 billion users every quarter, New Hampshire and Maine have the second-lowest average "click-through" rate on online ads in the country. Only Utah is lower. The data, as I found in this...
Tomorrow: Zika virus is the topic at Science Cafe in Nashua
Tomorrow night (March 16) Science Cafe Nashua will be talking about Zika, the mosquito-borne virus and related disease, and how New Hampshire should see this threat, plan for its possible arrival and what we should know about the way global changes are impacting...
90th anniversary of the first liquid-fuel rocket launch, on a Mass. farm
Ninety years ago today, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket from a farm owned by a cousin near Worcester, Mass. (He was born in Worcester and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.) Today that field is the Pakachoag Golf Course, and I bet the jokes about...
What is it about pi, anyway? Why don’t we celebrate e?
Today, as you probably know, is the pi-est of pi days in American: 3.14.16, or pi rounded to four decimal points. I say in America because much of the world writes dates as day-month-year instead of month-day-year, so for them it's 14.3.16 - not too exciting. (Bonus...
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