Sam Noyoun posted an Instructable with 10 ways to improve your night vision. Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson covered some of these techniques in Astronomy Hacks (including the pirate eye patch trick), but there are a few I hadn't heard of:

1. Protect your night vision

It takes approximately 30 minutes for the human eye to adapt to darkness. Protect your night vision: do not look directly at bright objects (for instance car headlights when driving).
...

Robert Bruce Thompson, who has had a lot of experience looking at dim objects in dark places, says that only a red filter will work: green and blue won't do the trick. Robert also says that the elite forces and soviet special forces techniques don't work.

Related:

• Astronomy Hacks - Link
  
• Snopes on carrots and night vision - Link
  

Quinn Norton has posted the slides from the popular Body Hacking talk she gave at O'Reilly's recent ETech conference. She defines body hacking as:

Acting on yourself, with or without assistance, to enhance the function of your body or your perceptions. Body hacking is, like all other forms of hacking, ultimately a form of violation: the freedom to enact your will upon a system.

Going beyond the more obviously transgressive body modifications (such as scarring, piercing, tattoos, and subdermal implants), she shows that much more is at stake than cosmetics, for both body hackers in particular and society in general. Co-opting Make's mantra ("if you can't open it, you don't own it") to our own physical body, she points out the need for control (or at least an attempt at control) of our most important asset: ourselves.

Quinn herself has a rare earth magnet implanted in her finger, giving her a "sixth sense" (in addition to the obvious ability to lift small metallic objects with a single finger), which is itself fascinating, though not nearly as interesting as hearing her describe the process of getting it, her reaction and response to it in her body, and the larger implications for such a procedure.

I heard Quinn deliver a more informal version of this talk to a smaller, rapt audience last year, and all indications suggest that the response is the same every time she gives it. If you haven't had the chance to hear it directly from her, you'll want to check out the slides and video links at the end of this post. Quinn's really putting body hacking on our radar as a fascinating area that's moving quickly.

Links:

• Conference abstract
  
• Conference slides
  
• Video of talk in Berlin at 23C3

(via Boing Boing)

Brady wrote to announce details on the next Ignite Seattle event, scheduled for April 5. With just a few sessions announced, Candace McNaughton's Health Hacks should be of interest to Hackszine readers:

Natural medicine quick fixes. Eight simple solves for common issues. Candace McNaughton is a naturopath who specializes in diabetes and practices in Capitol Hill.

Related:

• Ignite Seattle!, a Radar/Make Night
  
• Call for Speakers for Ignite III (4/5 in Seattle)
  
• Ignite Seattle is Next Thursday (4/5)

It's hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks--replacing the ubiquitous beer--facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee--or Diet Coke or Red Bull--to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn't exist.

Slurped in black coffee or sipped in green tea, gulped down in a soda or knocked back in a headache pill, caffeine is the world's most popular psychoactive drug - [TreeHugger points to global warming...] Link to National Geographic article...

My pal Mikey pointed me to Energy fiend, a fantastic site that has new caffeinated energy drinks along with caffeine content in each drink - Link.

Also - Celsius just popped up on my radar, 400mg and no corn syrup, anyone try this yet? - Link.

Fun fact from energy fiend...Sweden, Denmark and Norway -- all around 400mg of caffeine per person per day. Cracking DRM, running pirate bay - it all makes sense now.

Pictured here, my brief experimentation with caffeine soap.

Bre Pettis, Make: Blog's resident Media Maker, adds this photo and description to the Hacks Flickr pool:

If you wear glasses like me, you'll forget them at some point or you won't have them on and you'll need to read a street sign. The magic of a pinhole can help. By looking through the hole you make with your pointy finger, middle finger, and thumb, you will be able to see, in focus, things both close and far away.

Related:

• Mind Hacks
• Mind Performance Hacks