Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Nobel Prize in medicine is for a traditional Chinese medicine, updated
Many - no, let's be honest: most - traditional, ancient medicines are useless or feeble, long ago surpassed by scientific medicine. But sometimes the overused idea of "ancient wisdom" leads to something useful, and in those cases we should be grateful. One of those...
Dartmouth’s robot football tackling dummy to meet Stephen Colbert
Colleges, even the Ivy League superstars, love to seem cool as a lure to future students. So Dartmouth has got to be preening over the fact that the robotic football tackling dummy developed by the Thayer School of Engineering and Football Coach Buddy Teevens ’will...
TechOut brings NH another startup competition with six figures
The startup competitions are coming fast and furious. Last Friday was Rise of the Rest, featuring AOL founder Steven Case (if the words "warm regards" come to mind, you were also online before that Internet thing got up to speed*), which gave $100,000 to FreshAir...
Study: NH has put up just .01% of feasible commercial solar power
It seems surprising that more businesses don't have solar panels on their roof, especially all those in big industrial buildings with big, flat roofs. (Gaze down while taking off from Manchester airport southbound on runway 17/35 and you'll spot a sea of flat-roofed...
The little telephone museum that could
Small-town museums are, let's be honest, usually cute and amusing, but not much more. And I speak as a guy who helps run my small town's history museum. That's why I was so delighted by the New Hampshire Telephone Museum in tiny Warner, which is an excellent museum...
UNH develops a new type of cherry tomato … mmmmmmm
I don't know about you, but my garden went bonkers this year, especially the cherry tomatoes. I almost go sick of the darn things, there were so many of them for so long. But I didn't get sick of them, because cherry tomatoes are one of the reasons that life is worth...
Celebrating our astronaut, Alan Shepard, and his … boat?
Alan Shepard might have been the first American in space (not in orbit - he rode a sub-orbital Mercury-Redstone 3 flight on May 5, 1961) and was one of just 12 people who have walked on the moon, but because he's a New Hampshire boy, growing up in East Derry, we want...
Geeky pub quiz with racey subtext coming to N.H.
Remember when "geek" meant a mutant who worked for a circus and bit the heads off chickens? No, I don't either, but I do remember when it was a seldom-used word that was mildly insulting - not as bad as "nerd" (or "knurd," as I learned to spell it - which is "drunk"...
NH study: Education and politics have a messy effect on climate change opinions
A new research paper analyzing 35 surveys from 2010 to 2015 about climate change has found some obvious correlations with political beliefs (liberals are much more likely to agree that it's a human-caused problem* than are conservatives) and education (the more...
Is that a chip in your card or are you happy to buy from me?
Tomorrow (Oct. 1) is the deadline for retailers to be able to accept the new charge cards with RFID chips on them, or face greater liability from card fraud. Many, particularly small retailers and shops and restaurants, will miss the deadline - because the new readers...
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