Posts by Concord Monitor/Granite State News Collaborative
As mythological metaphors go, the one that SNHU Professor David Humphreys gave during a recent talk about the eruption of technologies known as artificial intelligence wasn’t terribly reassuring.
The mixed-use proposal to replace the Steeplegate Mall and adjacent Regal Cinema is one of the biggest that Concord has seen in years. It calls for five residential buildings to be built throughout the property, each four or five stories tall, with a total of 625 units, half one-bedroom and half two-bedrooms. It comes from Needham, Mass.-based Onyx Partners Ltd., a commercial real estate development firm that has developed and owns properties in many states, including several in New Hampshire. It specializes in malls and shopping plazas.
After some poking around I’ve decided on an explanation using an analogy from chemistry class: What happened in our housing market was like dropping a seed crystal into a super-saturated solution.
So I was interested to hear of an MIT startup founded by a physician that makes it easier to do group testing for COVID-19, often called pool testing, via saliva rather than nasal swabs. It seems like it could be a quick and relatively easy way to spot outbreaks.
A COVID-19 vaccine being tested in New Hampshire has been approved for use in the United Kingdom, where developers believe it will be effective against a new variant of the virus, but that doesn’t change the local trial.
As New Hampshire gears up to keep the roads clear during snowstorms, the possibility of COVID-19 sidelining drivers looms large, particularly because there aren’t as many drivers as there once were.
You can add another activity to the list of those complicated by COVID-19: Climbing mountains in winter so you can ski back down.
The pandemic has clobbered the world of pro sports just as it has clobbered every other activity, but its effect on New Hampshire’s income from sports betting may not be too bad. In fact, it might not be bad at all.
From the very start, the biggest worry of health officials is that too many people will get COVID-19 at once and overwhelm hospitals, causing a ripple effect. They’re seeing that out West right now. New Hampshire never came near that level of cases in the spring and hopefully won’t this winter, but of all the figures that the Monitor follows right now, the number of active cases in state hospitals is probably the most important.
New Hampshire’s small but thriving meat-processing industry, the creation of years of effort accompanying the state’s resurgence in small farms, seems unaffected by the turmoil in the vastly larger industry in other parts of the country.