In all racket sports, a well-executed serve can establish a real advantage. Badminton is played by around 220 million people across the globe and a“spin serve” took badminton by storm when a Danish player at the Polish Open 2023 badminton tournament used it to dominant effect.

Like in table tennis, a spin-serve in badminton adds pre-spin before the racket touches the shuttlecock and the natural spin determined by its feathers’ inclination angles plus the pre-spin makes the flight trajectory even more unpredictable.

Naturally, instead of expecting players to adjust and improve, the community demanded the Badminton World Federation ban it. Coaches and players said extended rallies were more exciting for fans than good serves.

The most common cancer-causing strain of human papillomavirus, HPV16, can reprogram immune cells surrounding the tumor to help cancer grow, and new work in mice blocking this process helped treatments prevent the spread of cancer.

HPV is common in humans and in most cases clears naturally but HPV16 is linked to over half of cervical cancer cases and roughly 90% of HPV throat cancers. The HPV vaccine can prevent those cancers if vaccination occurs prior to HPV exposure but young people are the first generation to have the vaccine readily available.

You have probably heard the phrase “follow your gut” – often used to mean trusting your instinct and intuition. But in the context of the gut-brain axis, the phrase takes on a more literal meaning. Scientific research increasingly shows that the brain and gut are in constant, two-way communication. Once overlooked, this connection is now at the forefront of growing interest in neuroscience, nutrition and mental health.

Until the 1980s, the modern-day Malthus acolytes like Drs. Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren predicted Population Bombs and advocated for government-mandated sterilization and abortion to prevent it.(1)

Science didn't buy into the doomsday narrative and the poor have benefited.

Rather than the world starvation social authoritarians claimed only they could prevent, food has become so plentiful and affordable that modern social authoritarians now demand poor people be banned from buying food that government panels segregate. For the first time in the history of planet earth, the poorest people can afford to be fat.(2)

That was not a problem for the poor even 50 years ago.(3)

"If it was up to the NIH to cure polio through a centrally directed program instead of independent investigator driven discovery, you'd have the best iron lung in the world, but not a polio vaccine." - Dr. Samuel Broder, M.D., former Director of the National Cancer Institute

Epidemiologists correlate inputs to outcomes by looking at surveys and diaries and then seeing what foods, products, or behaviors to outcomes, like better or worse health.

It isn't science and is often exploited but it has led to big public health wins, like showing that cigarettes and alcohol cause cancer - instances were human clinical trials would be unethical. Recommendations like not adding salt or not eating eggs became fads because epidemiologists claimed it and media highlighted it, the same way the Mediterranean Diet and buying organic food did. There are so many confounders scientists throw up their hands and walk away but corporations exploit it to billions of dollars in revenue.

On August 13-15 I will attend for the first time to the Swedish Physics Days, an important national event for Swedish physics. This year the congress takes place at Lulea University of Technology, the institute where I am currently spending some time, hosted by the Machine Learning group through a Guest Researcher fellowship granted by WASP (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program).

Donald Trump, alleged by many to be President of the United States, has demanded that Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan resign immediately. Thanking the American public for our “attention to this matter,” Trump claims Tan is “conflicted” due to his investments in China.

I dare suggest that Tan respond as follows:

"I made an AI clone of myself and now I am going to live forever" is not a joke.

My AI twin, Bloombot, created by Ryan Dean, the Chief Technology Officer of the Howard Bloom Institute, is designed to carry on my way of thinking after I shuffle off this mortal coil.
In other words, it is going to do its best to replace me.

No, the BloomBot is not exactly me. But it defies belief. The Bloombot is nimble on its digital feet, can do research that would take me a month in seconds, and can write phrases I wish I had written myself.

And sometimes the BloomBot goes even farther. It uses my ideas as seeds and erects trees of imagination and reasoning that rise to rapturous heights.