Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Vermont faces a problem with large-scale composting: It’s hard not to make it stink
Vermont is a leader in large-scale composting and has mandated that virtually all food waste must stop going to landfills by 2020. But it's finding that large-scale composting has some nasal complications. As Seven Days reports: The stink at the compost facility on...
MIT may use MOOCs as an admission test for master’s programs
The Chronicle for Higher Education reports that MIT is proposing to use its own free open online courses as a filter to sort through all the people who want to be in master's programs there. (Story is here) Students who do well in a series of free online courses and a...
A new way to fight Lyme disease: Inject us directly with antibodies
Vaccines work like this: We're injected with controlled doses of disease-causing microbes, either dead or live, and our system creates antibodies to fight the disease. Those antibodies linger in our bloodstream so when we encounter the microbes later on, we're ready...
A floating upside-down cup, 80 feet across
In the days before natural gas was piped into communities, gas lighting and heating used "manufactured gas" - made by burning and processing coal, and sometimes oil. Most communities had their own Manufactured Gas Plant, because it wasn't easily transported in the...
The most depressing leaf-peeping article you’ll read – I mean hear – today
Somebody online called my Monitor column this week, which laments the speed at which climate change is happening, the most depressing leaf-peeping article they'd ever seen. So Pete Biello and I brought it to NH Public Radio in our weekly GraniteGeek chat. Fall is...
In Vermont, even some wind-loving utilities say “enough wind power for the moment”
Seven Days, a statewide independent newspaper in Vermont, reports that even Green Mountain Power, which is about as crunchy-granola as a major electric utility gets, thinks it has enough large-scale wind power for the moment. (Story is here) The state's largest...
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...
Return to the Concord Monitor