Making fuel from growing stuff (plants) instead of fossilized stuff (coal, oil) sounds like a great idea for all concerned, but it’s not that simple. (Is anything ever simple? Sigh …) Two examples:
Sometimes biofuels hurt the economy of those they should help: Corn-based ethanol will harm, not help, New Hampshire farmers because it will raise [...]

I apologize for the multi-day outage, which was caused by moving-the-server-related problems. Your lives were probably gray and dismal without GraniteGeek, but hopefully you won’t encounter such withdrawal pangs again.
re

The bald eagle count in New Hampshire this year wasn’t expected to be impressive - not because eagle numbers are down but because the warm winter meant open lakes and ponds, which meant birds are more spread out than usual at this time of year, and therefore harder to find.
Still, the New Hampshire Audubon Society [...]

One of the most interesting (e.g., painful) results of the Internet revolution over the past few years has been on mass media - you know, citizen journalism and the demise of the traditional advertising model. A symbolic moment in that shift occurred this week as New England’s only pseudo-national newspaper, the Boston Globe, pulled in [...]

UMass-Lowell, which is part of a three-college Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing with UNH and Northwestern University, is touting a business survey that says manufacturing is more important than research in nanotech right now. This is not exactly surprising, since Lowell emphasizes the manufacturing side of the billionth-of-a-meter stuff, while the other schools are [...]

There was a lot of press yesterday about a report from MIT saying that geothermal energy - pouring water on underground hot spots and using the resulting steam to drive generators - could provide as much as 10 percent of the nation’s energy. This website has a picture of an MIT professor pointing to a [...]

When 1999 was fading, I asked readers of my Telegraph science column for their opinion on the greatest accomplishment of mankind over the past millennium. Moveable type was the most popular answer, but my choice was indoor plumbing. Nothing, I thought then and still do, has improved so many lives so much for so long.
It [...]

Over-realiance on a quick medical test last spring caused Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center to think it had a huge number of whooping cough cases. Follow-up tests showed this wasn’t true, says the NY Times, leading to concerns about increasing reliance on molecular tests. Those use P.C.R. and are sensitive and fast, but are whipped up individually [...]

You know those funky symbols that warn about radiation, or a bio-hazard? A Canadian group called ETC Group has launched a competition to choose the equivalent for nano-technology. They’ve got a Web site where you can submit your ideas - the one above struck my eye, if only for its geekiness. I don’t know that [...]

The Telegraph has a story about a Nashua resident who took Al Gore’s training session on spreading the word about the reality of climate change, a la "An Inconvenient Truth." I imagine he’s not the only one in New Hampshire, either.
It’s great that we’re finally getting over the hump about spreading the word and [...]

FairPoint, the North Carolina company that wants to buy Verizon’s land lines in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, says it has competed with cable TV in Washington state by providing television over DSL lines via Internet Protocol, and wants to do the same here. Verizon provides TV over faster fiber-optic lines with its FIOS service, [...]

I was tickled to read about a weird habit that our neighbor to the north has: Making people answer easy math questions (e.g., multiply 90 by 2, divide by 6 and multiply by 12) before they can collect prizes in public contests. Alas, it’s not that the land of poutine and the "Little Mosque on [...]

As fish species decline off the east coast, the distinctive mix of aquatic meats that make up the traditional seafood chowder is also declining, as the NY Times reports.
Froim the article: "In 1985 fishermen landed seven million pounds of groundfish inStonington (Maine) alone. Ten years later those fish disappeared from PenobscotBay, and for the [...]

Parts of New Hampshire, especially the southern Connecticut River Valley and the North Country. won’t be getting iPhones, because there’s no Cingular service in those parts of the state. (Note: This is a correction of this post , when I mistakenly thought there wasn’t any Cingular in the state at all.) Apple’s new phone will [...]

It seems unfair to have the downside of winter - ice storm kills power to much of my town - without the upsides, like ice skating or skiing or snow to look at. As of Tuesday morning my home is nearing 24 hours without power, much to the disgruntlement of my teenage kids - who [...]