I caught an interesting interview last week with Dr. Mark Emmert, the NCAA president. There were a variety of topics covered during this candid interview, including whether the NCAA Basketball tournament would ever be expanded beyond the current 68 teams, whether college athletes would ever become ‘more than amateurs’, the current web of regulations that college athletic programs have to work within, and whether there will ever be a playoff in the football bowl system division.

Why do elite athletes risk take performance enhancing drugs (PED, dope)?  This question continues to be raised in light of Ryan Braun’s case.  Braun supposedly tested with extremely high levels of synthetic testosterone.  While Braun appears to have gotten away with taking PED’s because the appeal of his positive PED test was upheld yesterday based on ‘chain of custody’ issues, he risked some tremendous penalties by taking PEDs.  At minimum, the official penalty was a 50-game suspension.  Pr...

This past Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a piece on a Dr. A. Potti, a fairly renowned cancer researcher, who while at Duke University evidently manipulated his data so that his results would appear to better than they were.  There is no excusing this type of manipulation (or of data fabrication – which also happens in science as well), especially because it appears some cancer patients’ treatments may have been dictated by these flawed results.  But it leads to a bigger question: “Is scientific misco...

“Hey…pssstt….Did you know that about 25% of people die in their sleep? Frankly this concerns me so much, I may not go to sleep again.” Faced with that statement, most of us would scoff and continue with our life. So, why do we get so excited about people that die after they exercise? Is exercise so dangerous that we should all resolve to never exercise again?

If you didn’t see it, the U.S. Marathon Olympic Trials were held this past Saturday morning in Houston (the TV replay was on Saturday afternoon).  Experts say that we may have the strongest overall Olympic marathon team that we’ve ever had – but there is no guarantee that we’ll win any medals in this event because the Kenyans and Ethiopians have truly dominated distance running over the past 10 years.  Before you shake your head and turn to the next article, hav...