The Portland Press-Herald has a story about a wave-energy development company that wants to do testing at some of the sites off Maine which have been designated as test sites for offshore wind power. Read the story here. This is all very preliminary, as is most wave-energy work - a field that, in the U.S. [...]

There’s something about windmills that drives inventors crazy: Straight-ish blades spinning in a circle around a horizontal axis seems so old-fashioned; surely we can devise something cooler? Like a helix around a vertical axis! Or a funky-looking energy ball! Or magnets around the rim!
One funky-looking design got a heads-up in the climate conference in Copenhagen, [...]

Two University of New Hampshire assistant professors — microbiologist Vaughn Cooper and mechanical engineer Christopher White — have received prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grants. The grants aim to jump-start the careers of promising junior faculty, and the dollars, one million to Cooper and $400,000 to White, have certainly given their research efforts a [...]

BBC has a terrific story (read it here) about gardeners at a National Trust property in Britain (roughly equivalent to a National Historic Site here) getting their male employees to urinate on hay bales, which are used to speed up the composting process. The story has lots of great tidbits, including:

They don’t ask female employees, [...]

I have a story in the Telegraph today about Spica Tech, a small (6-person) firm in Hollis that does laser-damage testing on much of the optics used in the National Ignition Facility in California, the latest attempt to create “hot fusion”. I’m not holding my breath that NIF will succeed, but it is very cool Big Science. I couldn’t fit one interesting side point into the story: One of the most interesting hoped-for projects from the NIF is called LIFE, which would take spent fuel from atomic reactors and make it usable for fission power again. Here’s part of the decription from the Web site:

SORT-OF-RELATED ITEM: Here’s a story about hearings of health concerns from people living near the Mars Hill wind farm in Maine, due (it seems) to audible and low-frequency noise disrupting sleep and/or causing other stress.

Researchers say turning off wind farms in low winds would greatly reduce the number of bats killed by the spinning blades, [...]

The latest attempt to build a wind farm in New Hampshire, a 99-megawatt proposal sprawling across a long ridgeline in Coos County, has plenty of fans and plenty of haters, as this Union-Leader story about the final public hearing makes clear. It’s a boon to a poor region or a boondoggle for the environment, depending [...]

Those big, 1.5-megawatt wind turbines are becoming - well, if not commonplace, at least less rare. Placing a single turbine isn’t really news any more. Except in Portsmouth, R.I., I think, where one has just been erected next to the high school. The interesting thing is that the $2.92 million deal was paid for by the town, which will be using most of the power itself. It will provide about two-thirds of the annual electricity for municipal buildings, at a savings of “over $100,000″ a year.

It was only a matter of time before white-nose syndrome was found in bats in New Hampshire, since it has been found all around us. The Associated Press reports that this time, alas, is now: Final test results are still being awaited, but it sounds certain that it has been discovered in bats in a Grafton County cave.

Speaking of drawn-out battles over large wind farms (see previous post about Cape Wind), the Union-Leader notes that a number of towns have proposed ordinances on the books about zoning rules for small wind towers, set to be debated during town meeting season. It makes a good comparison to the cell-tower debate in the ’90s. [...]

The endless saga of the proposed 420-megawatt Cape Wind wind farm, between Cape Cod and Nantucket, took a big step forward today when the Minerals Management Service gave the project a positive environmental review, which is expected to “strongly influence” the Secretary of the Interior’s decision to award a lease for the project.
Don’t schedule a [...]

The Telegraph in Worcester has continuing coverage of the devastation caused there by the Asian longhorned beetle, a topic that has been mentioned here many times. There’s a quarantine on wood movement around the city, and they’ve started cutting down and destroying what will be many thousands of infected hardwood trees. The New Hampshire Maple Producers Assocation is terrified of the thought of this beast moving north of the border and has put out warnings to its members, to be on the lookout for signs of this invader.

The collapse last month of a massive coal-ash slurry lagoon in East Tennessee (not far from where I once lived, concidentally) led me to wonder what PSNH does with the ash generated from its coal-burning power plants in Bow and Portsmouth.
Company spokesman Martin Murray answer my query - here’s a slightly edited version:
We handle our [...]

Ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica, preserved at the UNH Climate Change Research Center, will be on display at the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium tomorrow, with demonstrations by UNH scientists. It accompanies a new, 20-minute planetarium show called Ice Worlds, which takes viewers to frozen landscapes of our solar system, including those of Earth.

We’ve all heard the old maxim that it is impossible to fold a piece of paper more than X times. I think when I first read this as a kid, the Xnumber was 8. When I tried it, sure enough, I ended up with a block of paper that couldn’t be folded again.
That wasn’t good [...]