Hope I don’t have too many power-plant items, but that’s a big topic now that the country is finally paying attention to global warming. This article sis about PSNH’s new 50 MW power plant in Portsmouth, that recently switched from using oil/coal to using wood chips from forestry operations. The link includes video by Telegraph [...]

The Friday event measured just 3.5 on the Richter scale, says AP. Apparently they’ve had a long string of these small temblors in that stretch of the Maine coast. We’re not terribly earthquake prone in New England, of course, but as the USGS history timeline shows, we’re not entirely immune.

When Portsmouth cranked up free WiFi in a small part of its downtown Market Square area, the move was unusual: The summer 2003 launch was the first Chamber-of-Commerce-sponsored public "hot spot" in the country. But now public wifi isn’t so eye-opening, so the city would like to expand the area to keep its tech-savvy reputation. [...]

PSNH is giving $1,000 to Nada Wigand, a graduate student at Antioch University New England in Keene, who had the bright idea of keeping track of the movements of black bears by examining the distinctive claw marks they leave on utility poles (they’re not really "telephone poles", but I bet that’s what you call them, [...]

Wind power is a good thing, but it’s not a perfect thing - and this New York Times article does an excellent job of bringing the overly enthusiastic down to a reasonable level:
"Wind turns out to be a good way to save fuel, but not a good way toavoid building plants that burn [...]

I guess it’s not a story any more when local events filter into wikipedia, but it was still amusing to note the changes made Wednesday to the article about disgraced Nashua School Superintendent Julia Earl. They include such things as "An erroneous report that she had misused public funds originallyreported by the Nashua Telegraph to [...]

Who should control nhtroopers.com and similar domain names - the New Hampshire Troopers Association (which represents non-officers in the state police , part of the Department of Safety) or the New Hampshire Highway Patrol Association (which represents the enforcement arm of the Division of Motor Vehicles)? That’s the subject of a long lawsuit, says [...]

No New Hampshire angle here - except that people in New Hampshire play chess, of course - but I loved this Retuers story of an Indian chess player found with a Bluetooth communicator sewed into his cap. Cohorts outside the competition hall would use a computer to send him moves. Cheating at chess is becoming [...]

The National Arbord Day Foundation has updated its hardiness-zone map, which says which plants are likely to survive in various parts of the country, to reflect warmer winters. The group says parts of Southern N.H. are now zone 6, although not everybody agrees.

As of July, New Hampshire towns will have to figure out what to do with junked computer monitors and TVs, because a state law will keep them out of landfills due to high lead content in the screens. (The figure I’ve heard is that a 15-inch CRT screen contains 1 1/2 pounds of lead, plus [...]

For $20 a month, residents of Brookline, Mass., a rich enclave that pokes into Boston like a slightly stand-offish relative, will be able to hook into the town’s Internet service as of this spring. The nodes are mounted on light poles and, since this is Brookline, much thought went into making them aesthetically pleasing.

If you don’t count Marconi’s Morse code tranmission, the first aural radio broadcast occurred on Christmas Eve 1906, from a small station in Brant Rock, Mass. (near Plymouth) by an inventor named Reginal Fessenden, who discovered amplitude-modulated radio. He was the first DJ, since he played some phonograph records, as well as broadcasting live music [...]

Santa has to go .07c hit all those homes in one night, according to this model. And you can keep track of the whole thing, thanks to NORAD.
(Hey - you try finding science news at Christmastime.)

The proposal in northern Maine would be able to produce 90 megawatts, more than three times the size of the proposed 25-mW Lempster Mountain Wind Farm near Keene. That makes it tiny by the standards of Seabrook (1,200 megawatts) or the state’s various fossil-fuel utility plants (150-700 MW*), but it’s still impressive by alternative energy [...]

In Massachusetts (and, I suspect, in New Hampshire), patrolling the online world for signs of misbehavior has become part of the job of teachers and administrators.
This is the part of the Globe story that gets me: "After Newton South officials spoke with students about the new policy,some expressed surprise, saying they thought the information [...]