Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Mass. flying car gets OK for test flights (scale model, that is)
Terrafugia, the Woburn, Mass. firm that wants to make a flying car ("roadable aircraft" is their preferred term) has gotten FAA approval to test fly a one-tenth-sized model of their next-generation effort. This is not their original design, now called the Transition,...
Winter is warming faster than other seasons in N.H. – much faster
Today's depressing weather chart is shown above, taken from this analysis by Climate Central. It shows that on average, winter temperatures in New Hampshire (presumably meaning Concord, where the National Weather Service has its official site) have risen four times as...
Uh-oh – Nashua paper confuses Star Trek & Star Wars
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...
Chestnut tree farm near UNH, another step to fight the blight
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...
Pithy Before The Colon: The Secret of Book Titles, At Least Sciencey Ones
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:...
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...
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