The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the dramatic rise in pot farms in Northern California is starting to take a toll on the surrounding environment. Agricultural practices like water-siphoning, pesticide spraying, and littering are having a noticeable effect on what is a very fragile ecosystem. More »
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California’s marijuana boom is wreaking havoc on the environment
In a medical first, researchers have streamed Braille patterns directly onto a blind person’s retina, allowing him or her to read letters and words visually, with almost 90% accuracy. Developed by researchers at Second Sight , the headset-like device is set to revolutionize the way degenerative eye diseases like Retinitis Pigmentosa are treated. More »
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New implant allows the blind to stream Braille directly onto their retinas
lee1 writes “Using special techniques that present information to one eye while hiding the information from the conscious mind (by masking it with more distracting imagery presented to the other eye), researchers have shown two new and very unexpected things: we can read and understand short sentences, and we can perform multi-step arithmetic problems, entirely unconsciously. The results of the reading and calculating are available to and influence the conscious mind, but we remain unaware of their existence. While we have known for some time that a great deal of sensory processing occurs below the surface and affects our deliberative behavior, it was widely believed until now that the subconscious was not able to actually do arithmetic or parse sentences.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Reading and Calculating With Your Unconscious
Romans may have used 20-Sided die almost two millennia before D&D , but people in ancient Egypt were casting icosahedra even earlier. Pictured above is a twenty-faced die dating from somewhere between 304 and 30 B.C., a timespan also known as Egypt’s Ptolemaic Period . More »