Yeah, so they’ve created an unbeatable checkers computer and computers beat the best of the best in chess - but thank goodness for Go, where humans still reign. (Not me personally, of course, but some humans.)

Photo by New Ipswich Police Department
The unfortunate crash of a kit homebuilt helicopter in New Ipswich yesterday (story and video here from the Telegraph) was a surprise to me, because while of course I know about homebuilt ("experimental" in FAA parlance) fixed-wing planes, it hadn’t occurred to me you could build your own chopper. That’s [...]

You’ve got to like it when the front-page photo of a governor’s budget presentation features a Nobel Prize-winning scientist (Craig Mello of UMass-Worcester, whose work on RNA’s role in the cell won him the 2006 prize for medicine) instead of another politician. Mass. Gov. Patrick wants a $500 loan guarantee to build a gene research [...]

For those of you unlucky enough not to read the Telegraph regularly, my column this week concerned the profile of a Merrimack man turned inventor turned entrepreneur, and how the fun of the "a-ha!" moment is less important that the bazillion other details that are needed to turn ideas into reality.

The NY Times has a good article (reg req’d) about questions being raised concerning the severity of "colony collapse disorder" - the disappearing honeybee peril. Some say this is a cyclic thing that gets blamed on current fads, rather than a new problem: "In the

I can’t say I understand all the details in the battle over whether to alter the nation’s patent laws - whether they’ll prevent bottom-feeding patent scroungers who bog down innovation in pointless lawsuits (one side) or squelch the ability of innovative little guys to protect their ideas and build new industries (the other side).
So I [...]

That’s the conclusion of a survey by the AeA called "Trade in the Cyberstates," as I reported yesterday. (I need to remember to link to my own stories, too!) The full report is only available if you buy it, but here’s a summary for upper New England, using 2006 data (sorry that I don’t know [...]

An American chestnut tree thriving in Farmington, when all other chestnuts long ago died of blight, has raised hopes for creating a disease-resistant strain and returning the species to our forests.
If this sounds familiar, it’s the "fighting Dutch Elm Disease" story all over again. I told the story in the Telegraph last month of one [...]

Chunks of New Hampshire - particularly portions of the Connecticut River Valley and the North Country - have been lamenting their shortage of broadband for as long as there has been broadband (and were lamenting the shortage of dial-up connections before that). The Globe reminds us today that we’re not alone, however: Some 32 towns [...]

New Hampshire is one of 48 states that will share a settlement from American Oline - or is it just AOL nowadays? - because the service made it so very difficult for people to cancel their accounts. This won’t enrich the state, though: The tally for all our customers is $48,000.
I belonged to America [...]

I’ve often heard it said that no major religion except Christianity has a subset of believers who have problems with evolutionary theory. Apparently not - the N.Y. Times has a story (reg. req’d) about a mysterious Turkish guy who produced an expensive, glossy creationist tome which argues that Darwin’s theory goes against the Koran, and [...]

British phone company Vodafone nixes rumors that it wants to buy Verizon , says this story from the U.K. paper The Guardian. To me, the interesting tidbit was this final paragraph: "While buying Verizon Communications would bring Vodafone the control of Verizon Wireless it has always lacked, it would also add a hugeAmerican fixed-line operation [...]

There’s been much alarm in NH and elsewhere about the inexplicable decline in honeybee populations (e.g., this GraniteGeek post), but Slate has an article today which says it’s not that big a deal in terms of our food supply, because the agriculture industry is already moving to alternative pollinators. It notes that this year the [...]

Some Princton professors have made an online "interactive game" to help understand how climate-change gasses can be controlled. It’s here, and it’s pretty cool, although it’s written in academic-ese (e.g., "The ’stabilization wedges’ concept … provides a common unit for comparing thecarbon mitigating capacities of various energy and storage technologies. ")
I found out about [...]

The Associated Press picked up a story about the Cincinatti police department buying a couple of Segways. It’s pretty funny because apparently Ohio doesn’t know much about them, so it reads like a story from right after the publicity explosion just hit. It calls them "standup scooters" on first reference, as if "Segway" would be [...]