Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
My car-buying conundrum as EVs (slowly) arrive
Note: This is the sort of personal rumination that I would normally put on Twitter, but I'm pulling back on that excellent social site for obvious reasons. At least for the time being, Twitter remains an excellent way to learn about science and energy news. I'm at...
To reduce ticks, burn more! Well, maybe
Ticks often live in litter that falls to forest floors such as leaves and thrive in thick grass which protects them from drying out (a big danger for these flat beasts). Prescribed burning it seems like a reasonable tool to reduce both forest floor debris and...
Two NH school districts get electric bus grants
Electric school buses make a ton of sense. There's less tailpipe pollution while they're idling in the schoolyard or waiting for a line of 7-year-olds to scramble aboard, operating costs are much less, and there are vehicle-to-grid possibilities with these...
N.H. voting population has changed more than you might think
The race for New Hampshire’s U.S. Senate seat will be decided by a different group of voters than when Sen. Maggie Hassan was first elected, because more than one-quarter of people eligible to cast ballots were either too young or didn’t live here in 2016. That’s the...
Gate-stealing is a weird, and mostly departed, Halloween tradition
There's a Concord community that calls Halloween "gate night" for reasons that date back a century - it used to be a common appellation because of the popularity of stealing people's garden gates as the trick part of trick-or-treat. It has faded, presumably because...
In some N.H. dairy farms, robots do the milking
I wrote a profile of a nearby dairy farm that has installed robot milkers: "With a combination of hydraulics, lasers, electronics and suction, the $420,000 setup determines which cow has entered the stall to feed via the RFID chip hanging around her neck, cleans the...
Wood heat: What’s old is new again!
The spike is the price of electricity indirectly caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which sent natural gas prices soaring, as well as the rise in the price for the same reason of heating oil, which heats somewhere around half of northern New England homes...
Can pre-fabrication speed up housing?
Everybody agrees that New Hampshire, like most of the industrialized world, needs more housing. Everybody also agrees that it’s hard to find enough skilled craftspeople to build the housing and that the result is too expensive. A partial solution exists, however:...
Here comes a COVID & flu two-fer
With New Hampshire’s hospitals starting to fill with COVID-19 patients, there’s no longer any question that an autumn surge has begun yet again. And if that’s not enough, it looks like flu season will return in force following a two-year lull. “Many of us can’t bear...
Online travel planner for Northern New England gets a mobile-friendly upgrade
If you haven't played with NewEngland511, the portal full of information on state roads in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, you have missed out. It's quite well done and has some fun stuff, such as what those big digital signs are saying (Maine sometimes jokes around...
Return to the Concord Monitor