And now for the latest chapter of It’s a Small World, Environmental Edition: I went out into some fields this morning and couldn’t figure out who was burning brush. Turns out the smoke was due to wildfires in Quebec (Globe and Mail story here), which is causing hazy skies throughout northern New England.
There are [...]

Interesting AP story:

When a fish taken from the Connecticut River recently tested positive for radioactive strontium-90, suspicion focused on the nearby Vermont Yankee nuclear plant as the likely source. …  State health officials say Vermont Yankee most likely was not the source of the radioactivity in the fish, a yellow perch. [...]

As I noted back in March (in this bit of prose poetry), the arrival of 4G over the next year or two means we’ll be seeing a lot of confusing mobile-phone techno-speak and also some cool features. AP has a similar piece today, spurred by the imminent arrival of Sprint’s first 4G phone.
This topic is [...]

The Sunday Globe has a story about a 20-person Nashua startup that makes a mobile videoconferencing robot called Vgo - a sleeker version of an idea from MobileRobots just down the road, which  the Telegraph has written about a couple of times - and notes that several companies are trying to merge videoconferencing and mobility [...]

NHPR has a great program hosted by Virginia Prescott called “Word of Mouth”. The program runs Monday through Thursday and covers science and social subjects.
Next week, not sure of the day of broadcast, she will be interviewing editors of MAKE magazine and Boing-Boing. The magazine and websites are something I have subscribed to and followed [...]

If that isn’t a great headline, I don’t know what is. “Put more nitrogen into milk, not manure” comes from this USDA research paper, discussing how dairy farmers should tweak cattle feed to reduce costs and the bad effects of dumping excess N into the waterways via runoff: “The scientists found that only about 20 [...]

Earle Rich and I are heading down to Greenville, NH, this morning to take a look at a unique wind turbine design recently patented by a local man. It has gotten a bit of press, and Earle wrote about it earlier this month. It will be the topic of a story/column in the next week [...]

Those of you saddened by the recent inability to post comments on this blog saying how wonderful I am, be aware that we realize the comment system is broken and are trying to figure out the problem. It appears to be some weirdness between Wordpress and the Telegraph’s online registration system, but other than that [...]

National Grid is turning on a 1.2-megawatt solar photovoltaic facility atop its Northbridge, Mass. distribution plant. Globe story here.
It’s the first of several megawatt-level solar facilities going on line in the next year or so; I’m going to have to start trimming out some of the smaller solar facilities from my regional alternative energy map!

Sometimes, walking by the book shelf in the shop, I grab an old magazine or book and admire the creative work that people did a century or more ago.
This from the August 6 1903 issue of The Model Engineer and Electrician:
THE LATEST IDEA FOR A FLYING MACHINE ~ The latest flying machine is that devised [...]

A shortage of methyl methacrylate,a monomer that helps make durable, reflective paint, due to problems at a production plant in Texas is threatening road projects around the country, the NY Times reports here. (The wikipedia article about the compound, linked above, talks about the shortage.)
In Texas, officials say the shortage could delay plans to recoat [...]

The Burlington Free-Press has a story (read it here) about a researcher who found one of the 15 bobolinks previously tagged with transmitters in Vermont, which carries information about the yellow-headed songbird’s annual flight between Vermont and his wintering grounds in South America. From the story:
“For the first time, we’ll know — did they get [...]

Tree-hugging types, delighting as Hummer died and electric cars became the talk of the town, and total miles driven plummeted, have wondered whether America’s auto-centric habits are finally changing. Personally, I doubt it; I thought it was just a temporary shift caused by the recession, but this story from AP does lend the idea a [...]

If you’re hitting New Hampshire’s beaches this Memorial Day weekend, beware the nesting pairs of piping plovers - two at Hampton Beach State Park and one at Seabrook Beach.The nests are fenced off to keep people away, but New Hampshire Fish and Game is also asking people to keep their dog on a leash and [...]

Mascoma, the Lebanon, NH-based cellulosic ethanol bioful company that is trying to turn two Dartmouth professors’ work into a new business, is having some problems. Difficulty raising the necessary scores of millions dollars has caused it to push back the opening date for its Michigan plant by a year, to 2013, as reported here by [...]