Boing Boing presents these words from our sponsor: Real Tested CBD.

Forbes is reporting, “two Canadian researchers think that a special strain of cannabis might potentially be a valuable tool in the fight against COVID-19.” (Source: April issue of the online medical journal Preprints)

First, it is important to note that it would be very difficult to do such research in the US because the Federal government continues to block research on cannabis.

See: After 4-year delay, DEA will review dozens of requests to grow marijuana for research.

Second, the published information is limited because the research is based on proprietary strains of cannabis, plus the researchers do not yet seem certain about which ingredients and which ratios are key.

They do say, “Cannabis sativa, especially one high in the anti-inflammatory cannabinoid cannabidiol (CBD), has been proposed to modulate gene expression and inflammation and harbour anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties... Working under the Health Canada research license, we have developed over 800 new Cannabis sativa lines and extracts and hypothesized that high-CBD C. sativa extracts may be used to modulate ACE2 expression in COVID-19 target tissues.”

They add, “The extracts of our most successful and novel high CBD C. sativa lines, pending further investigation, may become a useful and safe addition to the treatment of COVID-19 as an adjunct therapy… They can be used to develop easy-to-use preventative treatments in the form of mouthwash and throat gargle products for both clinical and at-home use. Such products ought to be tested for their potential to decrease viral entry via the oral mucosa. Read the rest

Boing Boing is proud to present our sponsor Real Tested CBD!

This article was originally published on Real Tested CBD. To view the original article, click here.

Cannabidiol is the second most prevalent compound in these plants. Pot plants and hemp both contain cannabidiol. In other words, hemp contains cannabidiol and no tetrahydrocannabinol. Pot plants contain both.

Some strains of pot have been developed to be high in cannabidiol. For example, the AC/DC strain has a hemp-like profile because it contains less than 1% tetrahydrocannabinol and 14% cannabidiol. Using a strain such as that won’t get you high.

Other strains, such as the harlequin strain, do contain more tetrahydrocannabinol than hemp. Harlequin has 5% tetrahydrocannabinol and 8% cannabinol. That might make you feel a little different than a product that contains only cannabidiol as the primary active ingredient.

Although cannabidiol can make you feel relaxed and relieve anxiety, it doesn’t intoxicate you. It acts on different cannabinoid receptors than tetrahydrocannabinol and produces distinct effects.

Cannabidiol also has many health benefits. Many people have heard about it because it was found to help control seizures in rare cases of epilepsy. The Charlottes Web strain was bred with high levels of cannabidiol and low levels of tetrahydrocannabinol and is known for reducing epileptic seizures in a young epileptic girl named Charlotte Figi. The FDA approved Epidiolex, a cannabidiol-based drug, for these conditions in 2018.

Now, experts are finding out that cannabidiol can help with a lot of other health issues, including:

Psychological conditions, such as panic disorders, generalized anxiety disorder and PTSD Pain, including headaches, nerve pain and arthritis Sleep problems Inflammation Depression Inflammatory bowel disease

Cannabidiol is an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant. Read the rest

Boing Boing welcomes Real Tested CBD as a sponsor.

Real Tested CBD shares the following essay by their co-founder, Richard Cowan.

It's Time for Silicon Valley To Finish Its Job of Disrupting the Racist Drug War

It Has Been Racist From The Beginning and Racism Cannot End Until It Does

By -- Richard Cowan

Mark Zuckerberg, the Icarus of the Internet, is debating his own employees about whether Facebook should be responsible for correcting the lies of certain high ranking politicians. The answer seems obvious, but are they really prepared to choose which lies require their personal attention?

Icarus was undone by trying to fly too high and to be above it all, but there is another Greek myth that is more ¨down to Earth¨ literally.

As I watch the seemingly inexhaustible torrent of prohibitionist propaganda, I am reminded of the Greek myth about Hercules and the stables of King Augeas.

The term “Augean stables” means a huge mess, because King Augeas had a vast number of cattle, which were herded into the stables every night, but no one cleaned up after them. (Governments always expect other people to do their dirty work.)

As a consequence, the stables overflowed with what the Greeks called “drug education.”

As in Hercules’ time, the government provides the fodder at one end, and the other end –the Greeks called it the “media” –  produced the inevitable product. It stank to high heaven, but it seemed impossible to do anything about it.

Most people said it was beneath their dignity even to think about it, although not thinking did not stop them from writing about it.

Read the rest

Boing Boing proudly welcomes Blue Ribbon Hemp as a sponsor.

The new buzz word in all things health related is certainly CBD, less known as cannabidiol, one of the compounds found in a cannabis plant. Consuming CBD has become more and more mainstream, and the methods of consumption are changing with the times. Many people are interested in the much talked about health benefits CBD are thought to have, but they haven’t found the best way to take it without getting a hemp aftertaste. Well, remember those handy Listerine strips that always saved your breath but didn’t do much more? Now you can get the same minty freshness, and with the added benefits of CBD from Blue Ribbon Hemp.

  Blue Ribbon Hemp is a new CBD company specializing in products for seniors. Founded by Richard Cowan, a long-time CBD and cannabis advocate, and Dr. Igor Bussel, M.D., M.S., M.H.A is a clinician-scientist and ophthalmic surgeon. The two have crafted a range of high quality CBD products from oral strips to capsules and lotions.

One of the fastest and easiest ways to consume hemp-based products with an immediate effect is through oral consumption. An oral strip, made of an incredibly thin layer of “paper,” is water soluble. Because of this, the amazing plant benefits packed into the small strip instantly get absorbed sublingually to your bloodstream. Instead of eating something and waiting for it to pass the digestive system, oral strips instantly dissolve upon contact with water or saliva. With the active ingredients being absorbed so quickly the beneficial effects can be felt almost right away. Read the rest

Boing Boing welcomes Real Tested CBD as a sponsor!

If you’re looking into an online purchase, nine out of ten times you go to Amazon, right? For many of us, Amazon has almost become part of daily life. It’s undeniably convenient; you can get anything from the latest in technology to toilet paper delivered, to a pre-manufactured house in a shipping container. Just about whatever you want to buy, Amazon has you covered. But have you ever tried searching for CBD on Amazon? The results might not be what you expected.

There are hundreds of items that come up when you search for CBD on Amazon, but the labels and descriptions can be fairly confusing. You might see a lot of “hemp oil” or “hemp oil extract” instead of flat out “CBD oil.” So where do we go from here? Do these products really contain CBD and offer any relief to people looking to manage pain or anxiety? Can you be sure of the CBD product you are purchasing on Amazon?

The short answer is no. The long answer is: yes, but let us help you read between the lines and ensure you are getting the real deal with your online purchase. Basing your purchases on lab-based test results is the best way to shop smart for CBD online. Customer reviews and product descriptions can be misleading, so stick to the facts from experts who test independently for your safety and security. The moral of the story is that you can’t trust everything you read online, even if others have already made the mistake of trusting it! Read the rest

Boing Boing welcomes Real Tested CBD as a sponsor!

We at Real Tested CBD are continually striving to bring you information about the best CBD brands and their respective products available in the market. The CBD industry is thriving due to new-found awareness amongst the consumers. Thanks to the Internet and the laws allowing legal use of CBD and hemp-based products. 

At Real Tested CBD, we run thorough lab tests on each brand and product on our platform, and it includes checking the authenticity of their claim to be a CBD product. Plus, we also test these products for any traces of industrial pesticides and solvents. Today, we bring you another review of one of the most popular brands in the CBD industry.

CBDfx is a manufacturer of CBD products and oils from Chatsworth, California. They carry a wide variety of CBD products extracted from full-spectrum, broad-spectrum, and isolate hemp plants.  These products include CBD oils, CBD vape juice, CBD capsules, CBD products for pets, and more. Here are our reviews of six of their products. It’s always better to review before you buy!

CBDfx’s Hemp Gummies 40 Mg

Image Source: RealTestedCBD

Our top choice to review a CBDfx product is their Mixed Berry Hemp Gummies. It is an excellent CBD product that comes from broad-spectrum hemp extract. It is a non-GMO product that is 100 percent vegan and gluten-free.

These yummy gummies contain 40 mg of hemp-based cannabinoids, and our lab results found this claim to be spot on – kudos to CBDfx. Read the rest

Boing Boing welcomes Real Tested CBD as a sponsor!

Real Tested CBD is known for efforts in bringing information about the CBD products for not only established brands, but the budding brands in the niche. We fuel our passion through the zest of our clients, asking us for updates on what is happening in the CBD universe. Thanks to the laws in the US that allow legal production of CBD products for health and research, there are some premier products on the market, but it's important to know what you are shopping for to ensure the best purchase.

We at Real Tested CBD run all the products through lab tests and present everything in black and white for our readers. This way, our consumers get to find out what product they are getting and if it is worth getting at all. Today, we review Charlotte’s Web and its CBD products that include balms, creams, tincture, edibles, and capsules. Here is a review of all the nine products of Charlotte’s Web that we tested.

This hemp-infused balm by Charlotte’s web comes with 150 mg of botanical blend hemp extract. It has a soothing scent, and we found no traces of pesticides and solvents in the mix. Moreover, it contains all the goodness of CBD at 107.2 mg per pack. It also contains THC at 4.69 mg and CBC at 4.48 mg per package. However, our test results indicate that the total CBD levels were lower than those claimed on the label.

This Canine hemp-infused balm is for adult dogs with 450 mg of hemp extract. Read the rest

Boing Boing proudly welcomes EST as a sponsor.

The Torch L1 by EST Gear is the world’s most versatile flashlight. It features a unique L-shaped design so you can use it hands free as a headlamp or stand-it up with it’s ultra-handy, flat, magnetic bottom. Stick it, clip it, carry it or wear it. This super-bright, waterproof, rechargeable flashlight is capable enough for every adventure and small enough for everyday use.

Learn more! Read the rest

Boing Boing is proudly sponsored by Privacy Safe!

PrivacySafe is building the anti-cloud. For the first time, you can order a portable, private, and secure IoT storage appliance built on a fully-open stack.

Pre-order now to take advantage of early-bird pricing and get discounts on other privacy-respecting services and open hardware.

https://privacysafe.ai/indiegogo

Pocket-sized! Cutting edge, military-grade encryption Free and Open-Source Software and Open Hardware, so it can be completely audited for malicious code. Your files are encrypted locally, in your home or business, on hardware you can touch. Tor .onion addressing BTCPay Bitcoin payment processing. Avoid payment fees, forever! Monero wallet on-board Malware protection with real-time virus scan, network, and bluetooth monitor Password vault with keyring and strong passphrase generator

Read the rest

Boing Boing is proudly sponsored by Sugar and Kush!

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Unhealthy CBD products Unregulated CBD Industry Pure Unflavored CBD Oil Best Carrier Oils for Bioavailability Laura Brenner & Sugar & Kush CBD Conclusion

Cannabidiol, or CBD, is one of the many cannabinoids found in the cannabis plant. Unlike the more well-known cannabinoid THC that gets you “high,” CBD can be extracted from industrial hemp, which is legal nationwide under the Hemp Farming Act included in the 2018 Farm Bill.

The science is developing, but people use CBD widely with claims that it acts as an anticonvulsant, analgesic, anxiolytic and a gentle sleep aid. With and without the presence of other cannabinoids, CBD is used to help with PMS, and as a support for focus, and against anxiety.

Pet owners are now dosing their pets with veterinary formulations of CBD to calm them down during thunderstorms or when traveling. (Editor's Note: DO NOT GIVE YOUR PETS THC, or CBD products that are formulated for humans. Talk to your veterinarian first.)

If you want to find the best quality CBD gummies, oil, vape or edibles though... good luck. The market is flooded with junk.

Unhealthy CBD Products

If you take a look at the vast variety of CBD products available on the market now, it’s difficult to rationalize how you could think of most of them as health and wellness products. The market is full of CBD infused candies packed with sugar more suited for a trick-or-treat bag than an item you might find in a medicine cabinet. Read the rest

Boing Boing is proud to welcome EST Gear as a sponsor!

Finding great tools is difficult, but this awesome shovel from EST Gear is said to be the world’s most capable camping and adventure tool and we can see why because, wherever your journeys take you, it’s not going to let you down and it can get you out of a fix or two.

With The EST Shovel Multi-Tool you’ll be prepared for anything. This packable lifesaving survival tool is ideal for any camping adventure. Plus, the EST shovel is easy to keep anywhere, such as your car, truck or your bug-out bag. Featuring 18 tools in one, it combines a shovel, ax, saw, spear, knife, fire starter, wire-cutter and nail puller. It also features a bottle opener, whistle, compass and more. Made of 420 hardened-steel, the reinforced shovel head is strong enough for any situation and the military-grade aluminum handle makes the multipurpose adventure tool lightweight and easy to use.

You can save 50% off when you pre-order on indiegogo, the campaign is already over 250% funded and it ships in June. Read the rest

This post was sponsored by Glowforge. Click here to get $100 off a Glowforge Basic, $250 off a Glowforge Plus, or $500 off a Glowforge Pro.

This is the second of two videos on how to make a Raspberry Pi based tabletop retro-video game arcade machine. (Here's the first.)

Once we bought the components and made sure everything worked it was time to design and cut the cabinet.

Any graphics program will work with the Glowforge. You can even use a hand-drawn image because the Glowforge has a built-in camera that scans your drawings and converts them to cutting, scoring, and engraving lines.

Cutting

Once we had a design we liked, we uploaded it to the Glowforge app. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping the image file onto the page, then placing the design on the photo of the material You can move the images around the material in order to fit multiple components onto the same piece of stock.

The first prototype we made had sharp corners, and they poked into our palms when we used the buttons and joystick. So for our second design, we used a living hinge, which is a cool way to bend wood. With these kinds of hinges, you can make beautiful and functional things.

Customization

The Glowforge not only cuts material, it also engraves designs - even photos - in high resolution. We engraved one of our favorite characters  -- Q*Bert, the famous cussing cube-hopper. And my daughter and I took a cue from the original Macintosh team and engraved our names on the inside of the cabinet. Read the rest

[This post is sponsored by Glowforge. To get $100 off a Glowforge Basic, $250 off a Glowforge Plus, or $500 off a Glowforge Pro use the link glowforge.com/boingboing.]

My 15-year-old daughter and I love retro video games. We often go a retro video game arcade in Pasadena, California, and we also play a lot of computer games from the 1980s and 1990s. We thought it would be fun to build a dedicated machine at home that we could use to play these retro games.

After a bit of online searching, we found out it’s easy to use a Raspberry Pi, which is a $35 single board computer the size of a credit card, along with a free Linux based operating system called RetroPie that has emulators for every arcade and console imaginable. We could use a Raspberry Pi and RetroPie to play every arcade game we want. And with our Glowforge laser cutter, we could easily make an arcade cabinet for ourselves as well quickly make them for friends and family.

In this 2-part video series, which was underwritten by our friends at Glowforge, I’m going to show you how we did it.

Parts and Materials

First, we bought all the parts and materials we needed to make the cabinet. We got a Raspberry Pi Model 3 B+, a 32GB MicroSD card, a power supply, a 10-inch HDMI monitor, a set of arcade buttons and a joystick, a pair of speakers, some cables and a box of various machine screws and nuts and standoffs. Read the rest

The following is a sponsored post produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Hennessy.

Joy Buolamwini is a poet.

But she isn’t the kind of poet who fills journals with purple prose hoping to some day be published in an obscure literary magazine. Instead, the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League is a self-proclaimed “poet of code” who combines engineering with powerful language and compelling performance to ask urgent social questions of tomorrow’s technology.

In July, Buolamwini was invited by Hennessy to be one of the bright minds visiting company headquarters in Cognac, France, as part of a celebration of the 200th Anniversary of Hennessy V.S.O.P Privilège. And this was a party with a purpose.

Hennessy gathered masters in arts and design, science, technology, music and entertainment, business, aerospace, and the culinary arts for a series of conversations, workshops, and experiences to explore a single question: What is the future of mastery? How does poetry in code relate to the intuition, skill, and tradition flowing through Hennessy’s own distilleries?

Part of the answer is in Buolamwini’s moniker, which juxtaposes the art of poetry with the applied science and research of code. This is also where Hennessy’s mastery lies, in the realm between unquantifiable yet perfect taste—and an expertise in using all technology has in order to offer to iterate and improve.

Buolamwini uses poetry and science in a very distinctive and important way: “I use art alongside rigorous technical research to highlight overlooked ways AI can inadvertently propagate stereotypes of gender and race and other kinds of discrimination,” she says. Read the rest

Boing Boing is proud to welcome Outvote.io as a sponsor.

Want to get Dems and progressives elected in the 2018 midterm elections? In 5 minutes? From your couch? There’s an app for that.

The majority of registered voters missed the last midterm. Unsurprisingly, most people won’t admit it. Young people are the worst when it comes to pretending that they’ve voted.

So how can we get people into the voting booth this November? It turns out that reminding your friends to vote is surprisingly effective.

The bottom line is that people trust their friends. If your longtime pal tells you something about a candidate, you’re much more likely to trust their opinion than a TV ad. In fact, during the 2018 primaries, friends that got a single text via Outvote became 10% more likely to vote.

The Outvote app shows you which of your contacts have missed a recent election by matching them to publicly available voting data provided by the state they live in. It then makes it easy to send reminders to everyone that needs them.

The app will even tell you which of your friends live in the critical swing districts that are needed to take back the House this November.

The average person has about 500 contacts. You could easily have 50 votes sitting in your pocket that aren’t going to show up unless you text them.

MoveOn, Swing Left, Flippable and Democratic State Parties across the country are all using Outvote to get Democrats and progressives to the polls this year. Read the rest

Boing Boing is proudly sponsored by David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs!

Enter for a chance to win a copy of Bullshit Jobs.

Is your job bullshit?

David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, analyzes the rise of the menial, hapless, unfulfilling jobs and their consequences.

There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.

Enter here to win a free copy of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs! Read the rest

Boing Boing is proud to welcome Wellbots as a sponsor!

DJI Spark is the best and most affordable drone on the market. It has a sophisticated design, latest technology and can serve all of your amateur or consumer based purposes. Spark is super easy to fly and shoot incredible videos. Check it out right there! (link: https://www.wellbots.com/dji-spark-mini-drone/)

Don’t forget to look at the combo pack to get the full range of accessories: smart flight battery, charging hub, propeller guards…

If you’re feeling like flying, let us help with a $30 coupon using the code BOING30.

For the DJI Spark Fly More Combo, with the code BOING40, users get $40 off.

The DJI Spark on Wellbots! Read the rest