Injuries are a natural part of sports, and back pain is not uncommon. A very specific back problem, spondylolysis, has been linked to athletics. A sports injury may initially begin as a stress reaction, then progress to a fracture of the pars interarticularis, which is the part of the bone connecting to the facet joints.…
On September 2nd, “The Dark Knight” (Matt Harvey) debuted his 2020 season with the Kansas City Royals. His return to the majors is a pretty remarkable recovery. Pitchers are probably the most injury-plagued players in baseball, but Harvey may have particularly poor “protoplasm”. He underwent Tommy John surgery in 2015, which is a repair of…
On September 3rd, Oskar Lindblom returned to the Philadelphia Flyers lineup in Game 6 of the East conference semifinal. December 2019, Lindblom was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, which is a rare cancer of the bone. Usually, this is diagnosed in adolescents and young adults, and it is the second most common primary bone tumor in…
It would appear that evolutionarily, music became something we did spontaneously. Our ancestors, with very limited language, appreciated music. One of the differences between the developed brains of Homo sapiens and those of the great apes is the increase in area allocated to processing auditory information… the temporal lobe. This basic function may be a…
The size of one’s brain, or certain brain areas, has been extensively studied and implicated in relation to intelligence. It’s presumptuous, but bigger is always better… right? Wet brain weight at autopsy, as well as three-dimensional imaging studies, have suggested that larger brain size may correlate with excelling in academics and life achievements, even after…
“To see others suffer does one good” – Friedrich Nietzsche Schadenfreude, the enjoyment of another’s misfortune, first appeared in English writing in 1853. Other languages have similar phrases. The Japanese have the proverb, meshiuma- “The misfortunes of others taste like honey.” The French have, “joie maligne”. The Danish talk of, “skadefryd”. The Hebrew saying is,…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad term that describes any task performed by a computer than normally requires human intelligence. Machine learning is a type of AI in which computers learn from existing data, without explicit programming, to predict new data points. Deep learning is a subfield of this, which deals with especially messy data…
This was a quote from a school-age friend decades ago, which I considered senseless at the time, but now appreciate in a different context as a spine surgeon. Low back paraspinal muscles play an important role in the stability and functional movements of the lumbar spine. The condition of the muscle, such as density, cross-sectional…
On Saturday, Colorado Rockies’ Daniel Bard clocked 99mph in a Rockies win against the Texas Rangers. Most would think the cardboard fan cutouts behind home plate would have been the biggest talking point. Bard only worked 1 1/3 innings and threw 25 pitches… but Bard’s story is quite a doozy. Never heard of Daniel Bard?…
Why They Did It, How It Worked, and What’s Next… We’ve recently learned that the Houston Astros sign-stole pitches, using a program dubbed “Codebreaker”. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal just published it was an intern who developed the Excel-based scheme used through 2017 and part of the 2018 seasons. The role in 2019 may be…