Brittney Walker

What do ticks, Apple, and a "Poppy" sensation all have in common? Well, your attention, dear reader.

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Trump's Voter Fraud Commission Wants All Your Data. What Could Go Wrong?

Trump's commission to investigate voting fraud wants to make all your voter data public. Here is every reason why experts on both sides of the aisle think that's a bad idea.

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Photo of the Week: A Dizzying View of a Bicycle Graveyard in China

Riders in Hangzhou, China abandon leave public bicycles all over the city. They've got to go somewhere.

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Nevada: Licensed Adult Use Marijuana Sales Set To Begin Saturday

Starting at midnight tonight, specially licensed medical cannabis dispensaries will have the opportunity to engage in the retail sale of marijuana to adults.

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Porsche's 700-Horsepower 2018 911 GT2 RS Is the Most Powerful 911 Ever

The sports car does 0 to 60 in 2.8 seconds thanks to a revamped biturbo flat-six engine.

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Every Question Donald Trump Asked on Twitter This Month, Answered

We're here to help.

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Binge-Watching This Long Weekend? Don't Try It With These Shows

Four-day weekend! Netflix time! Just because something is streaming online, though, doesn't mean it's suitable for a marathon.

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The Best New Products in June, From the New iPad to Coding Robots

Plus: Microsoft's Surface Laptop, Monument Valley II, and Dyson's fancy cord-free vacuum.

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Nevada: Licensed Adult Use Marijuana Sales Set To Begin Saturday

Carson City, NV: Starting this Saturday, July 1, specially licensed medical cannabis dispensaries will have the opportunity to engage in the retail sale of marijuana to adults.

State tax regulators finalized temporary rules on Monday governing adult use sales. Regulators so far have issued over 80 licenses to business establishments seeking to engage in activities specific to the production, testing, or sale of cannabis to adults.

“Adults in Nevada will now be able to access cannabis in a safe, above ground, regulated environment,” NORML Political Director Justin Strekal said. “To their immense credit, lawmakers expeditiously to implement the will of their voters. Elected officials elsewhere would do well to follow Nevada’s example.”

Adult use sales are anticipated to be limited because of an ongoing legal dispute regarding who may legally transport cannabis to retail stores. Last week, a Carson City judge issued an injunction prohibiting any entity other than liquor distributors from engaging in retail marijuana transport. As a result, retailers will only be able to sell their existing inventory.

“While we applaud Nevada for moving to enact their voter approved legalization initiative in a timely fashion, interested parties must now move quickly and decisively to resolve the pending issues around distribution. If supply remains constrained in the state it will drive up prices and ultimately lead to most retail outlets being entirely out of sellable product for the recreational market.” NORML Executive Director Erik Altieri said. “This will only serve to continue to drive consumers to the black market, the very thing residents voted to demolish, and will deprive the state of needed tax revenue that will instead go to underground operators.”

A majority of voters decided in November in favor of the Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act – a voter-initiated regulating the adult use marijuana market. In May, state regulated decided in favor of expediting the timeline for retail marijuana sales from January 1, 2018 to July 1, 2017.

Seven additional states — Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington — no longer impose criminal penalties with regard to the adult possession or use of cannabis.

Businesses in the state still do not have protections from the Justice Department, led by militant prohibitionist Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recently stated marijuana is “only slightly less awful” than heroin.

You can click here to easily send a message to your federal lawmakers in support of pending legislation, HR 1227: The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act by clicking HERE.

Opinion: Climate Change Is Making Cities Sick

City leaders must do more to integrate climate concerns into public health policy.

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Designing Genderless Emoji? It Takes More Than Just Losing the Lipstick

It took a year and a half for Paul Hunt to cook up Unicode's first gender-inclusive emoji—but now your keyboard is a little less binary.

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Elon Musk's Chicago Tunnel Makes a Dumb Idea Even Dumber

Airport connections to mass transit are tricky to build.

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The Encryption Debate Should End Right Now, After Vault 7, Shadow Brokers, WannaCry, and Petya

Any case for intelligence agencies to have special access to encryption moot.

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The Battle to Get Gender Identity Into Your Health Records

A decade ago, most electronic health care records collected just one piece of gender-related data: sex. Here's how that changed.

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The Beautiful, Impossible Dream of a Simpler Smartphone

Why is it so hard to build a smartphone that doesn't drive us crazy?

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Do You See Me Now? Psychology, Photography, and the Mobile Age

The world uploads 1.8 billion photos each day. They all say the same thing: "I am."

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Thursday, 29 June 2017

With Blue Apron’s IPO, Wall Street Reins in Silicon Valley

It's a sing of the times.

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Uber's Scandal Provides a Chance to Remake Silicon Valley

Opinion: The lesson of Uber is that we get the companies and the economy we ask for.

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MIT Research Helps Deploy Flying Cars Safely

A bit of clever math keeps everybody safe—and sane.

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Will the House of Representatives Let Jeff Sessions Shut Down Medical Marijuana?

This week, the House Appropriations Committee released its 2018 Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) Appropriations bill, which determines the funding levels for numerous federal agencies, including the Department of Justice. Predictably, the bill does not include language -- known as the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer amendment -- limiting the Justice Department from taking action against state-sanctioned medical cannabis producers, retailers, or consumers.

Click here to send a message to your member urging them to support the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer amendment.

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Will the House of Representatives Let Jeff Sessions Shut Down Medical Marijuana?

This week, the House Appropriations Committee released its 2018 Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) Appropriations bill, which determines the funding levels for numerous federal agencies, including the Department of Justice. Predictably, the bill does not include language — known as the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer amendment — limiting the Justice Department from taking action against state-sanctioned medical cannabis producers, retailers, or consumers.

Although the amendment was reauthorized by Congress in May, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been aggressively lobbying leadership to ignore the provisions. President Trump also issued a signing statement objecting to the Rohrbacher-Blumenauer provision.

Nonetheless, support for the Rohrbacher-Blumenauer protection amendment has only grown in recent years. House members initially passed the amendment as a budgetary rider in 2014 by a vote of 219 to 189. By the following year, 242 House members voted in support of the language.

Yet even with bipartisan support, the text of this amendment has never been included in “the inline text” or “the base bill” of the CJS Appropriations bill. In every case of its passage, lawmakers have needed to add the language as a separate rider to the legislation and then vote on it on the floor of the House.

This year is no exception. Our allies in Congress anticipate a similar process to take place this fall and they are confident that we will once again be victorious — despite the best efforts of our opponents.

Reps. Blumenauer and Rohrbacher last night in a statement:

“The policy championed by Representatives Blumenauer and Rohrabacher that prevents the Department of Justice from interfering in the ability of states to implement legal medical marijuana laws (previously known as “Rohrabacher-Farr”) has never been included in the base Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (CJS) Subcommittee Appropriations bill. Rather, in previous years, Congress has amended the base CJS bill to include these protections.

We are exactly where we thought we would be in the legislative process and look forward to amending the underlying bill once again this year to make sure medical marijuana programs, and the patients who rely on them, are protected. Voters in states across the country have acted to legalize medical marijuana. Congress should not act against the will of the people who elected us.”

Thirty states now permit the doctor-authorized use of medical cannabis by statute, and an additional 16 states include statutory protections for the use of CBD. It is hard to imagine a scenario where a majority of lawmakers from these jurisdictions would vote against the best interests of their constituents, given the broad and bipartisan support that the amendment has received in the past.

It has been and will continue to be in politicians’ best interests to protect this progress and to protect voters’ freedoms from the encroachment of Jeff Sessions and the Justice Department.

Then click here to tell them to go one step further by urging them to support the newly introduced CARERS Act of 2017 which will codify these protections into law so that we no longer have to have these annual budget fights.

Twitter's Music-Site Meme War Isn't About Civility, It's About Money

The social media platform is cracking down on accounts spreading copyrighted materials harder than those spreading hate.

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Rotten Tomatoes is Deciding What Movies You Don't See—Without You Knowing It

More and more movies are tanking—and sure, they might be bad, but something else may be at play: metadata dependency.

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Instagram Unleashes a Smart Algorithm to Blast Away Nasty Comments

The social media site wants to turn itself into the friendliest place on the internet.

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Cadillac Challenges Tesla With the Super Cruise Self-Driving System

Debuting on the CT6 sedan, Super Cruise watches the driver to solve the ever-tricky "handoff problem."

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Vivobarefoot Ultra Blooms: Earth-Friendly Running Shoes Made of Algae

These new running shoes are made from algae-based foam. They look like Crocs, but you can run a marathon in them.

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The Trump Administration Can’t Stop China From Becoming an AI Superpower

If America wants to stay ahead, it's not a matter of trying to slow China down.

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iPhone Turns 10: How It Became the Everything Machine

It was the iPhone that taught people to tap, swipe, and pinch-to-zoom until they unwittingly fell in love.

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Your Connected Devices Are Screwing Up Astronomy

The radio spectrum is a limited commodity—and more and more of it is getting slurped up by consumer devices.

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Inside Nike Breaking2, the Epic Quest for the Perfect Marathon new messages

Nike's quest to break the two-hour marathon did not go as planned. But when you're pushing the limits of human performance, nothing ever does.

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Why Victims of Facebook Censorship Don't Leave Facebook

When network effects mean social monopoly.

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DHS Won't Extend Laptop Ban, But Its New Protocols Will Make Airport Security Extra Annoying

Expect more pat downs and closer inspection of your gadgets on flights into and out of the United States.

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Wednesday, 28 June 2017

Study: Patients Report Substituting Cannabis For Opioids, Other Pain Medications

Pain patients report successfully substituting cannabis for opioids and other analgesics, according to data published online today in the journal Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research. Among those who acknowledged having used opioid-based pain medication within the past six months, 97 percent agreed that they were able to decrease their opiate intake with cannabis.

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WikiLeaks Dump Reveals a Creepy CIA Location-Tracking Trick

By hacking into computers and tracking the Wi-Fi networks nearby, the CIA could pinpoint Windows PCs around the world.

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Editor's Note: Unicorn-Making Machines

Behind the scenes of Backchannel's incubator week.

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No, Donald Trump Isn't Calling For an Internet Tax

Reading too much into vague tweets (or anything, really) won't get you very far.

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This Cell Phone Can Make Calls Even Without a Battery

University of Washington researchers have made a phone that draws what little power it needs from thin air.

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Study: Patients Report Substituting Cannabis For Opioids, Other Pain Medications

Pain patients report successfully substituting cannabis for opioids and other analgesics, according to data published online in the journal Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Kent State University in Ohio assessed survey data from a cohort of 2,897 self-identified medical cannabis patients.

Among those who acknowledged having used opioid-based pain medication within the past six months, 97 percent agreed that they were able to decrease their opiate intake with cannabis. Moreover, 92 percent of respondents said that cannabis possessed fewer adverse side-effects than opioids. Eighty percent of respondents said that the use of medical cannabis alone provided greater symptom management than did their use of opioids.

Among those respondents who acknowledged having recently taken nonopioid-based pain medications, 96 percent said that having access to cannabis reduced their conventional drug intake. Ninety-two percent of these respondents opined that medical cannabis was more effective at treating their condition than traditional analgesics.

Authors concluded: “[M]ore people are looking at cannabis as a viable treatment for everyday ailments such as muscle soreness and inflammation. … [T]his study can conclude that medical cannabis patients report successfully using cannabis along with or as a substitute for opioid-based pain medication.”

The study’s conclusions are similar to those of several others, such as these here, here, here, here, and here, finding reduced prescription drug use and spending by those with access to cannabis. Separate studies report an association between cannabis access and lower rates of opioid-related abuse, hospitalizations, traffic fatalities, and overdose deaths.

Full text of the study, “Cannabis as substitute for opioid-based pain medication: patient self-report,” appears online here.

Gecko-Inspired Gripper May Soon Snag Space Junk

It could not only help robots get a good grip on things like space debris, but supercharge robots right here on Earth.

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Petya Ransomware Hides State-Sponsored Attacks, Say Ukrainian Analysts

Analysis shows Petya looks more like a targeted, state-sponsored attack than just ransomware.

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When Russell Westbrook Won NBA MVP, Humanity Outpaced Science

Through sheer will and indefatigability, the point guard became more than the NBA's MVP—he became a metaphor for hope.

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Eviation's Alice Commuter Is an Electric Plane for Wealthy Commuters

The battery-powered "private jet" could be in service by 2021.

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Pentagon ‘Space Corps’ Plan Leaves Earth Science in the Dust

Scientists and the military have often tussled when it comes to who is more important in outer space.

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Stasher Silicone Bag Review: These Reusable Silicone Bags Make for Killer Sous Vide

Stasher has teamed up with sous-vide company Anova to market its silicone bags to trendy home chefs.

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If You're Binge-Watching 'Broadchurch,' You're Doing It Wrong

The creators of the British crime series made it to be watched week-to-week, so that's what you should do.

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The X Prize Is Now Backing Sci-Fi Like It Backs IRL Science

To envision what humanity will need in the future, Peter Diamandis is turning to Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood.

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Inside Apple's 6-Month Race to Make the First iPhone a Reality

This story of the 24 weeks, three days, and three hours leading up to the launch of the iPhone is excerpted from Fred Vogelstein's 2013 book, "Dogfight"