Health/Science Briefs: Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Published: August 19, 2008

Texas Hold'em poker has exploded in popularity in recent years, even extending to academic researchers intrigued by the challenges of probabilities and decision-making in the face of uncertainties that confront players.

Now, poker-playing artificial intelligence systems, including "Fell Omen 2” and "INOT” (In the Nick of Time) developed by researcher Ian Fellows of the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, have been released for free public use.

The field of computer poker has made great strides in recent years. Fellows said "six years ago, a child could beat the best programs built; now professional poker players would be hard pressed to defeat INOT.”

To download the programs, including source code, go to http://thefell.googlepages.com/poker.

A new report on severe sporting injuries among high school and college athletes shows cheerleading appears to account for a larger portion of all such injuries than previously thought.

The latest annual report from the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at Chapel Hill, N.C., shows high school cheerleading accounted for 65.1 percent of all catastrophic sports injuries among high school females the past 25 years. Previously, the figure was thought to be 55 percent.

The story is the same in college sports. Data show cheerleading accounted for 66.7 percent of all female injuries.

Between 1982 and 2007, there were 103 fatal, disabling or serious injuries recorded among female high school athletes. The vast majority (67) occurred in cheerleading.

In recent years, there has been a surge in the number of active older adults. This is due in part to the aging baby boomer generation who recently began entering their 60s, remaining just as active as they had been in their 50s.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado Denver and published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine surveyed 145 men and women with a mean age of 65.5 years who had had shoulder replacement surgery and found that 64 percent of those surveyed had the surgery so they could continue to participate in at least one sport.

Of a group of 48 patients, 71 percent demonstrated improvement in the ability to play their sport, while 50 percent increased their participation rate. Swimming, tennis and golf were the most popular sports, and participants in these sports showed the most improvement.

From Wire Reports

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