Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
‘Biosimilar’ generic drugs – made via biology, not chemistry
Boston Business Journal has a story today about a Woburn, Mass., company called Blue Stream Labs that is expanding as it works to develop something I had never heard of: "Biosimilar" generic drugs: Unlike making a generic of a small-molecule (or pill-based) drug,...
Why do headlights look like light sabers in this drone photo?
David Vogt, a professional photographer, took the above gorgeous photo of the Milford Oval, my favorite town center in New Hampshire*, with a drone. It's a fabulous shot; I love it ... but I'm puzzled. Look at the four cars in the left hand side of the picture. They...
America’s Stonehenge – steeped in history, but what kind of history?
This is a sidebar to a feature package I wrote for Sunday's Monitor about winter solstice celebration at America's Stonehenge - I thought it would be the piece of most interest to GraniteGeek readers: Fans of America’s Stonehenge will tell you that the site predates...
GraniteGeek on the Air – the nega-watt edition
My weekly chat with Peter Biello at NHPR concerned, as it usually does, my Monitor column - in this case, about pricing for energy efficiency and how putting a dollar figure on the nega-watt is good for megawatts. You can listen (or read the transcript, which makes...
Sayonara, printed white pages
Printed telephone directories are, for obvious reasons, on the way out. Yellow pages and business listings still make money but white pages - residential listings - don't. FairPoint, the phone company in New Hampshire, announced last spring that it would stop...
You should celebrate Earliest Sunset Of The Year day today – solstice be darned!
Today, as you probably didn't know, will the earliest sunset of winter. Tomorrow's sunset will be a teeny bit later than today's, which is weird, because winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, doesn't arrive for two weeks. So what gives? Our clocks, that's...
What conducts electricity well? Bird poop conducts electricity well
This week I wrote a story about animals and birds causing power outages by interfering with equipment and power lines. Near the end I mentioned a fact that I learned while researching it: Bird poop, which because of bird anatomy is usually a mix of urine and feces,...
Clams are living deep in New Hampshire woods. Clams?!?!?
The second edition of Outside/In, a new natural-world podcast from NHPR, has hit the airwaves (if that's the right term for a non-broadcasted show). It is sort of like an extended variant of NHPR's long-running Something Wild segment, but with field reporting by...
US infant mortality rates falls to record low
The Centers for Disease Control reports that in 2014, "The infant mortality rate decreased 2.3% to a historic low of 582.1 infant deaths per 100,000 live births." That rate is relatively high for a rich country like the U.S. (Canada and the UK both have infant...
Could somebody create a mutant bacteria with a DIY set?
The ability of the technology known as CRISPR (actually CRISPR/Ca9, but who's counting?) to edit genomes of living things grows more astonishing each day. There are lots of positives to this, notably relatively cheap and accessible gene therapy, but there are...
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