Create your own game in a day and a half. That's the challenge awaiting participants in this weekend's New Hampshire Game Jam in Manchester.

Glenn Given and Michael Taylor are organizing the Jam; they sit down with All Things Considered host Brady Carlson to discuss how it works, the gaming scene in the region and what you can learn from trying to create your own games.

Fiddleheads are the whimsical, tightly coiled spiral of fern sprouts that push their way up from under the layers of winter debris on the forest floor. They are also a regional and seasonal delicacy, and their season is incredibly short. In some Southern parts of the state, it may already be over. For any given fiddlehead patch, it can last as little as a week and a half.

That means for those who harvest the sprouts, fiddlehead patches are closely guarded secrets.

About 100 people gathered at the State House Plaza on Thursday to highlight children’s mental health awareness.

Many there said more funding is needed to make sure children have access to proper mental health care.

Francine Gagne with the Greater Nashua Mental Health Center says children are often overlooked in the discussion about funding for mental health programs.

A government lab announced earlier this month that it’s been operating a quantum internet at Los Alamos for the past two years. Which led us to wonder, um, WHAT IS A QUANTUM INTERNET???  Joining us to explain it is Rob Fleischman, Chief Technology Officer at Xero-Cole, and the guy we call to help us understand things like, you know, quantum technology.

Syria’s civil war is now in its third year. More than 70,000 people have been killed; more than 1.4 million people have fled their homes; lives and families have been shattered; landmarks decimated and the economy is crumbling. Among those seeking refuge in neighboring Jordan are innovators and diaspora entrepreneurs who may well be seeding the ideas and infrastructure of Syria’s future. Patrick Clark is a reporter for Bloomberg Business Week covering small business and entrepreneurship and wrote about a tech boot camp for Syrians working in Jordan with Sarah Topol.

After first proposing a $450 million dollar casino at Rockingham Park, Millennium Gaming is now proposing a complex costing, in their words, “north of $600 million.”  The redesigned project was unveiled at a Town Hall meeting last night in Salem.

This week, U.S. concerns over the civil war in Syria escalated with talk of chemical weapons and the real fear that the conflict could spill over in the broader Middle East including Israel.  Now there’s debate in Washington about how this country should respond what the so-called “red-line is” and whether the Americans public is willing to cross it. 

Guests

For more than a year landowners and a conservation group have been trying to keep Northern Pass from finding a route through Northern Coos County.

But there’s one possibility that would give Northern Pass a big step forward: Crossing a huge conservation tract controlled by the state.

Such an effort could easily make the project even more controversial.

NHPR’s Chris Jensen reports.