A radio-collared bear being tracked as part of a University of New Hampshire professor’s research project about how bears interact with people was killed last month by Nottingham police after it tried to break into a woman’s home.

A few months ago I lamented in this blog that the battery had died in my iPod mini, and that I couldn’t get it replaced because it was one of the few sold by Hewlett-Packard - but HP doesn’t fix them any more, and Apple won’t do those (don’t ask me why, since they’re just iPods with an HP logo).

Helpful posters pointed me to iPodjuice.com, which sells batteries and kits to let you change them yourself. So I got one for Christmas

EVEN LATER ADDITION, FEB. 2, AFTER THE TRANSITION BEGINS: They are having issues migrating email from some accounts - including, it seems, those of people posting below. Short article here.
ADDENDUM: Here’s my story in Tuesday’s Telegraph.
I just talked to Jill Wurm, PR person with FairPoint who formerly worked for Verizon, regarding the Webmail confusion. She [...]

The Globe reports that a company is “exploring” dotting New England’s littoral zone with offshore platforms that would hold wind turbines and also draw power from waves. From the story:
The platforms would have hollow, perforated columns; as waves pass by, they would push air up through the columns, spinning turbines at the top. The platforms [...]

FairPoint appears to be saying that when Verizon hands off all control over phone/Net lines in New Hampshire sometimes next month, you’ll no longer be able to access your Verizon email through AOL, Yahoo! or MSN, but will have to go to the MyFairPoint.net portal.

Drilling out ice cores in polar glaciers to get a glimpse of ancient atmospheres trapped in the bubbles is one of the bedrocks of climate science. UNH has long been important in the field, and now a Dartmouth professor has been named director of a new office to oversee all ice-core activities funding by the [...]

Boston Business Journal reports that a Harvard, Mass., man converted the DC power from his Prius into AC and powered part of his home during an extended outage following the ice storm. Those electrical engineering degrees can come in handy!
Using hybrid cars for individual power storage is part of the overall picture of remaking the [...]

I found this interesting discussion on the Snow Journal forums about why ski areas are loathe to open some trails after heavy natural snows, unless they’ve already put down a base of manmade snow; basically, manmade snow is heavier and stickier on the ground, so it forms a base that lasts better in warm spells. Putting manmade on top of natural is a much less long-lasting arrangement, apparently.

What are you doing reading a blog, for crying out loud? It’s Christmas!

Consultants hired by Vermont have concluded that “Vermont Yankee is reliable enough to keep running after its license expires in 2012, provided its owners make some changes, including to the plant’s condensers and the cooling towers that collapsed in 2007,” reports the Burlington Free-Press in this story.
The 35-year-old nuclear plant on the Connecticut River, not [...]

OK, after seven days, we finally have power at our home in Mont Vernon. During the storm we were warm and comfortable with the wood stove cranking away in the living room doing its usual good job of furnishing with not just heat but also exercise bring in the fuel. I went out just about [...]

My column in the Telegraph today calculates Santa’s carbon footprint. Here’s the column.
I make reference in it to calculations from earlier Christmas columns and tell readers to come here for supporting links, so here they are:

Here is my calculation about how far and how fast Santa must travel on Christmas Eve, complete with my  best [...]

Boston.com’s Green Blog has taken up a debate from last year as to whether Boston should participate in the symbolic “cities dim lights for an hour to encourage conservation” event called Earth Hour. (”Symbolic” meaning either “inspirational” or “empty gesture,” depending on your point of view.) It’s set for March 28, a Sunday.
Here is the [...]

The lack of AT&T coverage in the Green Mountain State means that folks there can’t use the iPhone (unless they hack it, of course). But industry changes made because of an antitrust settlement involving the Verizon Wireless purchase of Unicel means this will change as of January, reports the Burlington Free-Press. The story notes that residents can get an iPhone with a billing address outside of Vermont, but many “didn’t want the inconvenience of having an area code other than 802.”

(ADDENDUM: It’s interesting to see the comments that accompany this news item on the Telegraph’s Web page: Five of the six are insult-laden, anti-environmental rants, including commentary about Al Gore (is it still 2006?). I love this one: “Why is Greenland all ice and Iceland all green…… just maybe the world is just changing again [...]