Your friends at ARDENT LIFE, INC. are sponsoring, promoting, and providing the prizes (including the giant $25,000.00 First Prize) for this amazing Contest, so you might want to know something about them (especially if you aren’t already an ARDENT customer). Here’s some information scooped from ARDENT’s website:

Ardent is a Boston-based biotech and medical cannabis device company with pioneering technologies that drastically improve administration and effectiveness. With a team of  partners skilled in all aspects of manufacturing from advanced thermal engineering to elite electronics, we produce the NOVA™, a laboratory-grade precision decarboxylator for medical cannabis patients. There is a reason that, up until now, cannabis users smoked or cooked their marijuana. To have any effect, the THC and CBD in cannabis must be decarboxylated to become biologically available. Learn more about decarboxylation here. Understanding that precise decarboxylation improves all forms of cannabis administration and is the key to accuracy in dosing, Ardent’s team of experts have refined and perfected the decarboxylation process in order to produce a patient-controlled, laboratory-grade device. Decarboxylated cannabis is more potent for smoking or vaporizing and can be eaten immediately.

Frustrated by the limitations of the inhalation and digestive administration routes, in August, 2013 Ardent founder Shanel Lindsay developed novel methods and processes for the administration of sublingual (under the tongue) cannabis. As this type of application had never before been observed, the Company filed for protection on the new  smokeless dosage form with so many advantages. The timing was appropriate. The expanding marketplace associated with the medical and social use of herbal cannabis has resulted in scores of speculative start-ups, while Wall Street’s growing focus on cannabinoid-based drugs resulted in G. W. Pharmaceutical’s 2014 $100 million offering to support FDA trials for its Sativex® and Epidiolex® sublingual sprays.