Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
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 $420,000 setup determines which cow has entered the stall to feed via the RFID chip hanging around her neck, cleans the...
Wood heat: What’s old is new again!
The spike is the price of electricity indirectly caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which sent natural gas prices soaring, as well as the rise in the price for the same reason of heating oil, which heats somewhere around half of northern New England homes...
Can pre-fabrication speed up housing?
Everybody agrees that New Hampshire, like most of the industrialized world, needs more housing. Everybody also agrees that it’s hard to find enough skilled craftspeople to build the housing and that the result is too expensive. A partial solution exists, however:...
Here comes a COVID & flu two-fer
With New Hampshire’s hospitals starting to fill with COVID-19 patients, there’s no longer any question that an autumn surge has begun yet again. And if that’s not enough, it looks like flu season will return in force following a two-year lull. “Many of us can’t bear...
Online travel planner for Northern New England gets a mobile-friendly upgrade
If you haven't played with NewEngland511, the portal full of information on state roads in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, you have missed out. It's quite well done and has some fun stuff, such as what those big digital signs are saying (Maine sometimes jokes around...
Rural broadband gets a big boo$t from Biden administration
The New Hampshire Executive Council has unanimously agreed to accept $50 million from the federal government to help the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative (NHEC) to extend fiber-optic broadband to 73 of the 118 towns in its service area. The landmark grant is the...
Football? Boring! Soil judging is where the action is
I will never use the phrase “common as dirt” again. My cliche vocabulary has been expanded. Common as silt loam? Sure. Common as sandy clay? Absolutely. Even common as sandy clay loam, although that’s a mouthful. These are terms I learned after stumbling across an...
A really good recycling project shows how the whole concept of recycling is broken
A pilot program for curbside collection of hard-to-recycle items like power cords and coffee capsules has been launched in Vermont and may come to Concord someday, keeping them out of the trash and turning them back into useful material. But while it is an admirable...
NH finally going to spend some of that ‘dieselgate’ money on EV charging
More than four years after New Hampshire announced that it would use $4.6 million from the “dieselgate” settlement to build public electric-vehicle charging stations, a contract has finally been signed to build one. The contract, announced Thursday, would install...
When it rains, it pours. Thanks a lot, climate change
From EurekaAlert: "They found that when it’s rained in recent decades, it’s rained more. In most regions, the intensity of the rainfall has shifted from lighter to more moderate and often heavy deluges. When it rained east of the Rocky Mountains in recent decades,...
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