The 2008 bald eagle breeding season in New Hampshire was the most successful in the state in over 60 years, setting several new record-high marks for productivity for this state-listed endangered bird, reports the New Hampshire Fish & Game department.

This would be an OK offshore wind farm by American standards, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not that big. Under GraniteGeek’s trademarked unit of power measure - the Seabrook - this wind farm would have an annual output of 3/10,000ths as much as the Seabrook nuclear plant.

700 billion is:
Enough money to widen I-93 in New Hampshire to 4,004 lanes.
The total number of steps that would be taken if the entire population of Worcester, Mass., hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine.

The nation’s first cap-and-trade, greenhouse gas auction produced an “allotment” price of $3.07 per ton of carbon dumped into the air, says RGGI. That’s much lower than anticipated a year ago, but within the 2-to-4-dollar range that had been expected more recently. The higher the price, the more incentive there is for electricity producers to [...]

SpaceX finally did it on Sunday, becoming the first private company to put a rocket into orbit. Three earlier attempts had failed.

It’s difficult to really define Knowledge Workshop: It can be a database, a personal information manager, a planner, an organizer - everything except a dessert topping.

Four-dollar gas has brought out scads of wishful thinking home-inventors, touting easy ways to “run your car on water” and other hoo-hah. (Like the Concord guy with his “fuel cell” that the Monitor fell for; make sure you read the excellent comment after my post which notes the “placebo effect” of these devices - once [...]

This blog’s resident wind-power realist (hi, Earle) won’t be surprised to read this Boston.com item, saying that the new wind turbine atop Boston City Hall is shut down because of too  much wind.
The 40-foot tall turbine is designed to withstand winds of up to 80 miles per hour, according to its manufacturer, but once wind [...]

Confusing “million” and “billion” is like confusing a fortnight and a generation, while thinking that “billion” and “trillion” are roughly the same is like thinking that Richard Nixon resigned at the start of the Ice Age.

Boston.com has a great photo display of winners from the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The close-up of suction cups on squid tentacles (photo number 4) is wicked cool - they’ve got little fangs!

The auction for carbon credits in 10 northeastern states runs from 9 a.m. to noon today, but we won’t know the results until Monday, because of the complexity of the auction process. Previous large-scale cap-and-trade programs have handed out the carbon credits before trading began; this is the first time some of them have been distributed by auction. Lots of people around the world will be watching carefully.

I was looking at some of the questions from the NECAP science test given to high-schoolers in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, and feeling quite humbled. (Check out the questions on this PDF yourself.) Let’s see … valence electrons? sex-linked trait progression? the effect of the mid-ocean ridge on Earth’s crust formation? Gulp. And then [...]

This is why UNH’s InterOperability Lab thinks the new Internet address system (IPv6) needs to be rolled out faster: This report says China will run out of addresses in less than 900 days.

New Hampshire Public Radio has a nice piece (here’s the transcript) about an environmental issue that I’d never thought of: De-icing chemicals on airplanes. They use propylene glycol, which isn’t toxic but which can remove oxygen from rivers. Runoff from Manchester Airport (darned if I’m going to add the “Boston” to their name, grumbled the [...]

CNET’s Green Tech blog has a long post about a tour of the Mascoma labs up in Hanover. These are the folks trying to create genetically modified bugs that will break down tough cell walls to make non-seed portions of plants release their sugars - thereby creating cellulosic ethanol (biofuel from wood chips and weeds, [...]