Did you know that the 2005 Northeast Women’s Atlatl champion lives in New Hampshire? Now you do. The Valley News has a good story about this spear-throwing device, complete with a sort-of-correct joke about geological time scales: the writer talks about having some "good, clean Cenozoic fun." The Cenozoic Era, as you may recall, started [...]

As this post on Area603 notes, at least one of the 400 representatives elected last week is an established blogger. Margaret Evan Porter (District 8 in Merrimack County) has a good sense of the importance of her new media voice, as this quote shows: "the voters didn’t know I was a blogger, except for the [...]

After a few problems with the Vermont portion of the bill were ironed out, the House of Representatives has finally passed a bill that expanded the amount of wilderness area - no motorized vehicles allowed - in New Hampshire and Vermont. The bill expands the wilderness area in the Green Mountain National Forest by about [...]

This brilliantly written (cough, cough) column should, I hope, whet your appetite to see Dava Sobel on Friday, Nov. 17, at Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord. She not only wrote "Longitude," the most original popular-science book in the past decade, but is a charming interview and has an unusual program scheduled. See you there.

The Adelphia-to-Comcast handoff led to a few Internet glitches in the Nashua area, at least. The funniest part of the story, I think, is that in at least one case, Comcast sent emails telling customers how to change software settings when the company switched mail servers so they wouldn’t lose service - but they sent [...]

Back at the time of the 2000 census, when we were buried in demographic data, I wrote a story for the Nashua Telegraph about how unusual the south Asian immigrant community was, by historical standards. Previous groups coming to New Hampshire, from Quebec "mill girls" to Italian granite-quarry workers to the Hispanic and Brazilian boom, [...]

Nothing shows how hard it is to find the best way to teach kids that the perennial debate about pre-calculus math. (See the latest installment, courtesy of the NY Times, here.)
Speaking as a guy with a dusty math degree (insert obligatory age joke: of course, there was a lot less math to learn then), [...]

That’s the essence of this Boston Globe story, which features industry leaders worried that the Bay State’s early nanotech prominence, fueled by academic research, won’t hold up as bigger states get into the race. New Hampshire isn’t even mentioned, despite efforts like the UNH Nano Group and the New Hampshire Biotech Council to raise our [...]

The New England Light Pollution Advisory Group (NELPAG) is a regional part of the "dark-sky" movement, which tries to dim outdoor lights to help us look at the stars and for other, largely aesthetic, reasons. The movement has had a real impact over the past decade or so, I think - "brighter is better" is [...]

No surprise: A study from UNH’s Casey Institute found the death rate in Iraq and Afghanistan is 29 per million in New Hampshire’s rural areas, compared with only 17 per million from urban areas. The difference, of course, is lack of job alternatives in rural areas.
Both figures, by the way, are higher than [...]

Naturally occuring arsenic in a problem in much of New Hampshire’s water table (see the jump for a June 14 story I did on a state study). So it was intriguing to see this New York Times story about a study of the ability of "nano-sized" particles of magnetite to attract arsenic in solution, [...]

They’re seeing yellow lampmussels in Hartford, Conn., the first time that bivalve has been spotted in the Nutmeg State in 45 years, according to this newspaper story. It’s a sign of the continued improvement in the Connecticut River, and New Hampshire can take partial credit.
It must be admitted that much of the cleanup, as is [...]

Those of us who get broadband through Adelphia - about a third of the broadband connections in the state, I believe (have to check that) - will be seeing a new name on the bill soon - Comcast or AT&T, depending on where you live in the state. Hopefully nothing will change for the [...]

Not much news other than post-election stuff today, but here’s an item that shows the debate over suitable fuel for power plants extends well beyond N.H. In this case, a New York state plant wants to burn old tires as a partial replacement for fuel oil; the downwind portions of Vermont have unsuccessfully objected.
Our big [...]

Since I mentioned this topic down below, when the moose-hunt season was ongoing, I’ll give it closure:N.H. Fish & Game says preliminary figures show the state’s nine-day moose season saw 449 moose "taken" (168 cows and 281 bulls), for a statewide success rate of 67 percent. That’s a lower rate than last year, when 78 [...]