Great story in the Christian Science Monitor about research on ways to cheaply and easily liberate hydrogen, so it can be used as a fuel. One method uses eggshells to soak up the CO2 released from gasified coal, freeing up the hydrogen. Eggshells "are mostly calcium carbonate, amineral that soaks up CO2. … LastSeptember, the [...]

Speaking of things I have little patience for (see two items down), owners of "exotic" pets drive me crazy. (That thought is prompted by a story about an escaped "pet" lion in Ohio.)
The need to define yourself by having an animal different from those owned by people nearby - sorry, that’s pathetic. And the [...]

A really easy way to increase the efficiency of a freezer is to fill it up. If you have seasonal variation in how much is stored in your freezer, use milk jugs filled within a couple of inches of the top with water and pack them in those empty spaces. The advantage of this is [...]

I have no sympathy for most anti-vaccine campaigns. With rare occasions - such as the legitimate debate over the necessity of the chicken-pox vaccine - the opposition is usually of the knee-jerk "it’s unnatural" variety, or anti-government conspiracy-seeking types. They know they can get away with it in our society because they’re surrounded by [...]

(Note to readers: we’re having computer weirdness today, so things will be sketchy)
The Press-Herald story casts doubt on whetherthe law is legal because of limits to state control over interstate shipping.The law seeks to prevent kids from buying cigarettes over the Internet thusly,says the story: "delivery companies must check packages against a list,from the state [...]

Just received this from my brother in Maine.
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Recently, the show “Mythbusters,” on the Discovery Channel performed an experiment to determine whether it is more energy efficient to leave alight on or turn it off when you temporarily leave a room (episode #69).Many of us have operated under the belief that if you are going to [...]

Good story from the Bangor Daily News, localizing a controversy about seven U.S. Fish & Wildlife Agency decisions being changed "after allegations surfaced that a former deputy assistant secretary inthe U.S. Department of the Interior pressured … staff to change decisions and leaked information to industry officials." A year ago, feds excluded 10,600 square [...]

When New Hampshire officials salivate about - er, talk about the prospect of a "green" economy that will create oodles of money and jobs from alternative-energy and its offshoots, they point to GT Solar in Merrimack, which makes the stuff that holds photovoltaic cells and turns them into PV arrays, rather than building the silicon [...]

This might be slightly inside-baseball-ish for us media folks watching our chosen profession go through some - shall we say - interesting permutations, but I enjoyed this column by a guy who started a "grassroots media" company and had it collapse under him. His name is Steve Outing, and he’s been an observer/commentator about media [...]

I attended a conference today in Concord titled "Is a Carbon-Free & Nuclear-Free Future Possible?" sponsored by Project Laundry List, the anti-clothes-dryer folks. It was an anti-nuclear crowd (judging from the silver hair, I suspect we had some of the old anti-Seabrook Clamshell Alliance folks), who argued that the issues of weapons proliferation and [...]

This collection of illustrations from Soviet magazines and a few other sources of the 1950s shows space travel the way it should be … gloriously elegant. If only the future lived up to our dreams when we got there.

The U-L has a story (light on tech details - when you’re writing on deadline at a planning board meeting, tech details can be hard to get) about a company that wants to build a big development in Raymond using a "new" type of wastewater treatment plant. The plant’s from MicroMedia Filtration of California, which [...]

Several area universities are pushing hard into nanotech research - notably UNH and UMass-Lowell - so this report, published in the journal Nature Nanotech is alarming. It says that, contrary to the usual pattern, scenitists are more worried about safety in this field that the rest of us are. Usually people freak out about new [...]

Or so says Snopes, which pooh-poohs the idea that the Monday after Thanksgiving is the businest online-shopping day of the year. It’s actually around the 12th busiest.

What about governments? They’ve got scads of stuff and lots of laws about maintaining it for public release, and are wrestling with how to proceed. Habits developed with file folders wrapped in - yup - red tape don’t always translate well to PDFs, email and documents in various word-processing formats.

And here’s a story about how [...]