I’m a carnivore and a fan of large-scale modern agriculture, but there are certain practices on today’s farms do that are just insane. One of those is pumping antibiotics into animals so they’ll grow slightly faster, even though this leads to drug-resistant bacteria infecting all of us. Attempts to rein in this practice have always [...]

A Massachusetts firm called Atlantic Geothermal - which had the great good taste to copy one of my past columns (with permission) on its Web site - wants to test whether central New Hampshire might be suitable for real geothermal power. They’re talking about Iceland-type systems, not the underground heat exchange that’s called geothermal hereabouts.
The [...]

Last September, as I was adding the last row to my woodpile, I took one piece of black cherry, carefully weighed it and marked the end with date and weight. This June, moving next winters fuel to the woodshed, I came across that piece and weighed it again. The loss of water was significant.
I started [...]

The online comic PHD (piled higher and deeper, of course), has a spot-on satire of academic conferences in this wonderful comic. “Topics include, but are not limited to, every possible combination of buzzwords.” It’s worth a moment of your helter-skelter morning romp through the Internets!

A public hearing with “more than 100″ people about a proposed 100-megawatt wind farm on the Fletcher and Tenney mountain ridges produced the usual concerns and support, according to this story in the Concord Monitor which has these quotes:

“I have no problem with going green - I’ve seen what oil does to the ground. [...]

PC Magazine did a huge “speed test” of Internet providers around the country. (Read it here) Some interesting conclusions for the Northeast:

Verizon FiOS is the fastest service overall in the Northeast (1.19 Mbps vs. 1.04 for Comcast cable modem), but its even faster out West, where it averages 1.70 Mbps. Not sure why - perhaps [...]

Lots of people are familiar with efforts to bring back the American elm, which was wiped out by Dutch Elm Disease, but fewer (including me until recently) know about similar efforts to bring back the American chestnut. That program, spearheaded by the non-profit American Chestnut Foundation, is using a multi-generational set of cross-breeding to create [...]

“Biomass” energy - burning wood, usually in the form of processed pellets or other post-scrap, for heat and electricity - has to play a large part in the energy future of the Northeast if we ‘re going to reduce fossil-fuel use, but it’s not as easy as it seems. This Tux Turkel piece in the [...]

Massachusetts-based Terrafugia has gotten Federal Aviation Administration approval to carry an extra 110 pounds on its “roadable aircraft” and still qualify as a Light Sport Aircraft. The company sought the exemption to the maximum takeoff weight so they could add automotive safety equipment like air bags and safety frame cage. (Here’s the press release. Here [...]

Comments are working again. Feel free to write some variant of “your brilliance continues to astonish me”!

Those wacky Italians! First they implode in the World Cup (are you allowed to have a World Cup without a team from Italy?) and then they decide that seismologists who failed to predict the deadly April 6 earthquake in that country are guilty of manslaughter! (Story from Nature.com here.)Unbelievable.
Hey, I have an idea: Nobody predicted [...]

Boston-Power get rejected in its request for $100 million from the feds to pay for R&D of better rechargable lithium-ion batteries for cars, but the private sector still likes it: It announced $60 million in new funding, largely to boost development of the batteries for H-P laptops.
Here’s a GreenTech media story; there are plenty [...]

Our bees have varroa mites, a parasite that looks like a little, tiny horseshoe crab. One method of controlling them is to open the hive and sprinkle powered sugar on all the bees; in the process of cleaning each other, they knock off the mites (which get stuck on a special sticky board we put under the hive). This picture shows my wife doing this weird little practice last weekend.

Perhaps not surprisingly, bees don’t really like being sprinkled with powdered sugar!

Tonight at 6:30 p.m. in room 301 at UNH-Manchester (400 Commercial St.), I’m going to be moderating a three-person panel with local business leaders about how to transition to a “clean energy” economy.  That’s assuming I can find my coat and tie.
It’s sponsored by “Repower New Hampshire,” a project of the Alliance for Climate [...]

Boston.com has a funny little photo spread from the Flea at MIT, a long-running flea market run by the MIT Radio Society and associated groups that draws people from all over. The photographer set up a sort of photo booth and asked people to show their wares and describe them. Easily the best is this [...]