… like a 40,000-gallon biofuel fueling tank at the South Portland waterfront, which sounds more like grist for a Marlon Brando movie than an Al Gore documentary.

Give up? I didn’t know, either: It’s the Mount Washington Observatory.
I learned this cool factoid through a press release from an alert PR person who knows what’s cool: "The Mount Washington Observatory’s weather station, located on the summit, has been conducting continuous weather monitoring and recording for over 70 years, every hour of every [...]

This time it’s the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment releasing a report about predictions of climate change to come, based on 10 indicators, including temperature, precipitation, snowfall, lake and river ice, growing season, sea-surface temperature and sea-level rise (click on the PDF link titled "Cross-Border Indicators of Climate Change"). Their conclusions are [...]

If you’re an alumnus of Dartmouth College, be ready to see an uptick in fund-raising appeals. The school has announced plans to build a $140 million, 283,000-square-foot research facility - named after the 1937 graduate and former surgeon general C. Everett Koop - and have it open in 2009
The school’s description sounds intriguing: "One [...]

Vermont Yankee might not be terribly notable as a nuclear power plant, but it’s got impressively tenacious opponents, as the Associated Press notes. The 650-megawatt plant (about half the output of Seabrook Station) looks likely to get an extension past its scheduled 2012 shutdown. It opened in 1972, when many of its critics were already [...]

The Portsmouth Herald has a story about a church that changed its Web domain name, only to find that its old URL was bought by a porn site.
It includes this interesting tidbit: the Internet company told him pornographic sites like to buy Web addresses once used by churches. And it’s got a great closing [...]

Portsmouth-based Global Relief Technologies, which combines GPS, wireless communication and specialzed software into a sort of super-duper Palm Pilot to gather data in the field, has received a $3.5 million contract to help Marine Corps crews track avian flu in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. Some details from this article in New Hampshire Business [...]

The media frenzy over the fifth anniversary of the iPod gives me an excuse to reuse a column from last September, in which I hold out hope that Apple’s "shuffle" function (the best thing about the whole iTunes/iPod affair, in my opinion) will provide a deep mathematical lesson to humanity: Random is not what it [...]

My science column today is about a Nashua man, Matt Maurlla, who’s associated with Slooh, a site that lets members control a telescope in the Canary Islands through an interface, shown above. He’ll talk about it Friday at the Christa McAullife Planetarium.

Back before Segway recalls brought Dean Kamen’s reputation down to earth, one of the things that tantalized everybody was his interest in Stirling engines. (This design, a sort of closed version of the internal combustion engine, has fascinated inventors for a century but has never quite proven feasible.) Hopes for a Stirling-powered Segway percolated through [...]

Here’s a sign of how much moose have returned to northern New England: The goal of this year’s moose hunt in the sparsely populated Northeast Kingdom of Vermont is to cut the population in half! Wow.

New Hampshire, where the nine-day moose season continues through Oct. 29, hasn’t reached that point yet, even though [...]

As a follow-up to a post below about Connecticut planning to drastically lower a lake in hopes of freezing out invasive plants, note that the New Hampshire Lakes Association says its 557 trained volunteers recorded 54 "saves" while staffing 66 lake ramps this summer. That is, 54 times, an inspection of a boat found milfoil [...]

Inside the mobile service tower on Launch Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral, workers check the placement of the first half of the fairing around the STEREO spacecraft. Photo by NASA/George Shelton.
UNH has made something of a name for itself over the past decade in helping develop devices and sensors carried into space by NASA satellites. [...]

Unlike the New England-based climate model predictions I talk about a dozen posts down, this one from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Texas Tech University, and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre is global. But a few conclusions affect us:
"Most areas above about 40 degrees north will see a significant jump inthe number of [...]

Two Dartmouth economics researchers, James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote, have bought themselves years of heated argument with this paper, which says that being colonized by a European country was often a good thing for small islands in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, producing economic benefits that continue today.
From the summary: "The number of years [...]