This very second, Silicon Valley startups are doing what they do best: working out how to grab a piece of the booming market in marijuana. Confident Cannabis, for example, is one start-up that’s put out a call for coders and techies to develop their front and backend software. Their aim is primarily making getting high “as easy as ordering delivery food.”

Sign of the times: President Barack Obama made a joke about his marijuana use at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Sixty-one percent of Americans live in states that have reformed their marijuana laws by allowing medical marijuana, imposing a fine — not possible jail time — on marijuana possession, or making marijuana legally available and regulated for adults’ use.

Even though medical marijuana is legal in 24 states and recreational cannabis initiatives are gaining traction throughout the U.S., weed is still a touchy topic for most in the medical profession.

Sure, some trusted doctors will talk openly about marijuana’s legitimacy as medicine — and many more are coming on board — but journalists’ interview requests to major hospitals and medical schools (even in Colorado) are still met with a nervous, “Uh, we can’t talk about that on the record.”

The Controlled Substances Act is not outdated. It is a law structured in a way meant to protect science, medicine, patients and the public. It is not absolutist. It has an administrative structure built into it to control for mistakes, new scientific discoveries and even evolving public or medical understanding.

Today’s federal drug laws appear to have done a disservice to marijuana, locking it into an inappropriate schedule where it is banned outright. But in reality, negative drug policy around marijuana is not the fault of the CSA. Instead, a variety of other factors — mainly attributed to biased lawmakers — have hindered the law from working properly when it comes to the drug.

Usually Presidential candidates announce running mates after clinching their party’s nomination. According to the L.A. Times, Ted Cruz is expected to name Carly Fiorina as his would-be vice president later this afternoon, an effort to gain political momentum in his battle against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. 

The Open Cannabis Project is building a record of all existing cannabis strains to protect the industry from commercialization.

Mowgli Holmes knows what he wants. When I call him, he quips almost immediately: “What I want to happen is for Snoop to come to my lab, put on a white lab coat and orange safety goggles, and smoke a gigantic joint in front of the DNA sequencer. That’s what I want to happen.”

It’s a PR stunt the biotech cannabis labs could use. Theirs has been a weathered brand.

Our circadian rhythm, or internal clock, helps to control much more than just our "sleep-wake" cycles. In fact, many tissues and cells throughout the body operate around this biological clock that changes how they metabolize glucose, amino acids, fats and other fuels. Moreover, most cells in the body also change how they respond to various hormonal and environmental signals based on where they are in the clock. These very signals of light, food intake, hormones and sleep also alter the body's biorhythm in turn. Essentially, it is a two-way street where the existing rhythm of the body's clock alters whole-body metabolism and physiology on the one hand, and environmental cues exert influence to regulate and help "set the time" on these biological clocks on the other hand.

Some rheumatoid arthritis patients say that using forms of medical marijuana eases the pain and inflammation they suffer from their condition.

Yet most doctors specializing in rheumatoid arthritis treatment were unaware that a growing body of research identifies medical marijuana's active ingredient, cannabinoids, as a possible arthritis treatment, according to a 2014 survey in the journal BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders.

David Umeh's rented SUV yanked to a halt in front of the glass-and-steel facade of CityCenterDC, glitzy home to Gucci and Dior and Hermes and the next customer of the marijuana revolution.

A young woman slid out the passenger side and strode up to a man still dressed in the sharp gray suit of a Washington DC nine-to-fiver waiting outside the centre's tony apartment building. He grinned as she handed him a bottle of apple juice with lemon and mint, for which he had shelled out upwards of $US55 ($A72). "Fresh-pressed," she told him, sticking to the script that Umeh had taught her.