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On a steamy afternoon in June, Jim Poynter, the coach of the 7-on-7 touch football team at Lamar High School in Arlington, Tex., escorted one of his former players around the state tournament. In a game last spring, the player, Brett Green Jr., was knocked out after his head collided with a teammate’s shoulder as they jumped to intercept a pass. Green was airlifted to a hospital, where bleeding in his brain was discovered. He spent weeks in the hospital recovering from dizziness, headaches and blurred vision, and had eye surgery and physical therapy. He will never play football again. (Belson, 8/20)

In his writings, Gary Marcus is clear about two things: Artificial intelligence is an extremely promising technology that, if used in the right way, could significantly improve practices in health care and other industries. But right now, Marcus says, AI is getting off track, with potentially severe consequences for society and the field itself. That viewpoint makes Marcus — a tech entrepreneur, author, and psychology professor at New York University — a controversial figure in the world of artificial intelligence. He is among a few prominent scientists voicing skepticism about the dominance of deep learning, a type of AI architecture whose use has exploded in medicine and other fields. (Ross, 8/21)

Vaping and smoking habits are more common among children with asthma who are most susceptible to their harmful health effects, state health research has found. The findings might seem contradictory on the surface, because children with breathing problems might seem like the last to take up smoking, but Minnesota Department of Health experts said Tuesday that they confirm a socioeconomic picture of both asthma and smoking being more commonplace in low-income homes and conspiring to harm child health. (Olson, 8/20)

Kaiser Health News: MDMA, Or Ecstasy, Shows Promise As A PTSD Treatment

The first time Lori Tipton tried MDMA, she was skeptical it would make a difference. “I really was, at the beginning, very nervous,” Tipton said. MDMA is the main ingredient in the club drug known as ecstasy or molly. But Tipton wasn’t taking pills sold on the street to get high. She was trying to treat her post-traumatic stress disorder by participating in a clinical trial. (Stone, 8/21)

If you wanted to measure your heart rate or step count during exercise, you would use a fitness tracker. But what if you wanted a device to tell you when when you need to drink more water or should reach for a sports drink? Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, designed a patch that can measure sodium in sweat and determine sweat rate directly from the skin. Their findings about the effectiveness of their invention were published Friday in the journal Science Advances. (Palca and Torres, 8/20)

Kaiser Health News: Joe Camel Was Forced Out Of Ads. So Why Is Juul Allowed On TV?

Why does e-cigarette maker Juul advertise its product on TV when cigarette ads are banned? The short answer: Because it can. For nearly 50 years, cigarette advertising has been banned from TV and radio. But electronic cigarettes — those battery-operated devices that often resemble oversized USB flash drives with flavored nicotine “pods” that clip in on the end — aren’t addressed in the law. (Andrews, 8/21)

As farm animals from across Minnesota head to the State Fair this week, the Board of Animal Health is asking everyone to help limit the spread of disease. Farm animal exhibits are a perennial favorite at the fair, but senior veterinarian Courtney Wheeler says from an animal health perspective, it’s a major challenge. (Enger, 8/20)

The University of California, Davis will be partnering with a pharmaceutical company to research cannabis ahead of the planned launch of its Cannabis and Hemp Research Center. In a news release, UC Davis announced its partnership with DEA-registrant Biopharmaceutical Research Company, which is an applicant to manufacture cannabis for federally-approved research into the drug. (Moleski, 8/20)