Car batteries, those lead-acid beauties, are 12-volt and have been for my entire life. They changed from 6-volt during the first half-century of car design, as engines got more complicated and batteries got better; the higher voltage allowed various improvements,...

The legal situation for the crowdsourced taxi firm Uber in Concord is a little squishy, as it is in many parts of New Hampshire, but the service is slowly expanding anyway, reports the Concord Monitor: Local cab companies have only noticed a minimal Uber presence so...

My former newspaper, the Nashua Telegraph, has a big story today about the opening of the new Star Wars movie (as does my current paper and every other paper in the contiguous United States). Alas, I expect Nashua to be picketed by enraged geeks, because the big...

From UNH: American chestnut has been under attack for a century from a persistent chestnut blight that has killed trees from Georgia to Maine and west to the Ohio River Valley. A potentially blight-resistant American chestnut tree plantation planned for the University...

Nature has a list of its 20 favorite science books of the year (why 20? if they weren't choosing the obvious 10 you'd think they'd pick a more scientific number like 16 (2^4)) - and it struck me that 19 of the titles include a colon. Examples include "Spirals in Time:...

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...

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...