Massachusetts Court Evades Answer to Whether Addiction a Defense

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 If addiction is a disease, why is relapsing a crime?
 

 This question was brought before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court this past year where a ruling was presented on Monday. The case was raised when a Massachusetts woman, whose probation terms mandated she stay drug-free, failed a drug test and was jailed for ten days before being placed in an in-patient treatment facility.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/courthouse2-01.width-990_boiDNfK.png"/>
<figcaption>The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Monday that a person with addiction may be jailed for relapsing while on probation.
 
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 The case has captured the attention of public health advocates, who say the judicial system should not punish people for having the disease of addiction, and law enforcement officials, who argue public safety is at risk otherwise.
 

 On one side, the defendant, Julie Eldred, argued she had been sanctioned for an illness she struggled with for over a decade. A large body of scientific research shows that addiction has the properties of other medical disorders, including genetic links and a susceptibility to medication. Eldred’s lawyers argued that it’s unconstitutional to jail someone for an active medical condition, not to mention an inefficient form of rehabilitation. “If it worked to punish people for addiction and relapse we would have a cured nation,” one of her lawyers said.
 

 On the other side, the attorney general argued that because Eldred committed a crime to support her drug habit (larceny in 2016 to support her heroin addiction), the judge had an obligation to protect the public that she may commit another. The judge was also protecting the defendant herself from overdosing, the prosecutors argued. Opposing briefs also highlighted the lack of consensus as to whether addiction is a brain disease, such as a
 <a href="https://mayoclinic.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/addiction-current-criticism-of-the-brain-disease-paradigm">
 2013 study in
 
 AJOB Neuroscience
 
</a>
 that concluded that “it is not necessary, and may be harmful, to frame addiction as a disease.”
 

 The highest court in Massachusetts ruled in favor of the prosecution, stating a person with addiction may be jailed for relapsing while on probation, though “such decisions should be made thoughtfully and carefully, recognizing that addiction is a status that may not be criminalized.”
 

 However, the seven-member court declined to take a stance on whether addiction is a disease that affects a person’s ability to comply with sentencing requirements. Because of that evasiveness, this may just be the beginning of how we treat addiction during sentencing. Here’s
 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/health/addict-relapse-probation-jail.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=science&amp;region=stream&amp;module=stream_unit&amp;version=latest&amp;contentPlacement=2&amp;pgtype=sectionfron">
 Jan Hoffman for the New York Times
 </a>
 :
 
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 But Fiona Doherty, a clinical professor of law at Yale Law School and an expert on probation, said that because the court did not take a position on addiction, the case was only a qualified win for the prosecution, confined to Ms. Eldred’s circumstances and timing.
 

 “The impact of substance use disorder and a defendant’s ability to prevent relapse is still open,” she said. “There is lots of room for lawyers and defendants to remount a challenge to the same drug-free condition. They can object at the time the condition is imposed and seek a full hearing on the science.”
 
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 In its
 <a href="https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2018/07/16/12279.pdf">
 27-page decision
 </a>
 , the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made little mention of the scientific research cited in support of the defendant, including briefs from the Massachusetts Medical Society, the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry, and Surgeon General.
 

 “We also agree with the Commonwealth that the defendant’s claim of [substance use disorder] rests on science that was not tested below,” the ruling read.
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ensh/4765611709/">
 Emmanuel Huybrechts / Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
 </a>

The much-anticipated results of a Phase 2 clinical trial for an Alzheimer’s disease drug were released last week.

Potential Alzheimer’s Drug Shows Promise, But Falls Short

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 Two drug companies for weeks have teased the results of a promising new drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease.


 In early July, Biogen, a Boston-based biotech, and Eisai, a Tokyo-based pharmaceutical company, announced the upcoming release of “positive topline results” for a large clinical trial of a drug designed to remove amyloid plaque build-up in the brain, a potential cause of Alzheimer’s disease.


 For investors, that teaser proved promising enough: the day before the full results were released Biogen stock hit a three-year high. For patients and industry experts, the news sparked hope that a treatment had at last passed an elusive clinical trial benchmark. Currently, there is no effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts nearly 5.7 million Americans, with cases expected to triple by 2050.


 But last week, when the full results were released at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Chicago, high hopes turned into cautious optimism. Several nuances in the study’s design have raised some questions about the findings’ significance.


 Rudy Tanzi, a geneticist and Alzheimer’s expert at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was at the presentation when the results were presented.


 “Did we see in the actual presentation what the top-line results promised? No. Did we see failure? No,” Tanzi said. “Did we see enough success to merit a Phase 3. Yes.”


 According to the study, 856 patients with early Alzheimer’s disease were given the drug, known as BAN2401, in one of five doses over an 18-month period. In one group, 80% of patients who received BAN2401 showed sizable reductions in amyloid plaque build-up on the brain. Those patients also performed 30% better on cognitive tests than patients receiving a placebo. Those two findings, at first glance, seem promising proof that removing amyloids in the brain helps improve mental functioning.


 “I’ve been in the field for 18 years, and I’m very encouraged by these results,” said Samantha Budd Haeberlein, vice president of Alzheimer’s late stage clinical development at Biogen. “It also gives us confidence that, in Alzheimer’s disease and in the amyloid pathway, we’re on the right track.”

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<h2>
 Cautious Optimism
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 The results came from a large Phase 2 trial, which is conducted to gauge the safety and efficacy of a drug before a larger, more expensive Phase 3 trial. Among drugs intended to treat Alzheimer’s, no other large-scale Phase 2 trial has shown that drops in amyloids lead to significant improvements in mental functioning.


 “I think it’s equivocal,” Tanzi said of the results. “I think they have enough to do a Phase 3. I don’t think it’s enough to get approval at this point.”


 While some argue that the drug is aimed at the wrong target–that amyloids are just a sign, not the root cause, of Alzheimer’s disease–Tanzi believes the drug is based on a reasonable hypothesis. Rather, his concern is that several of the study’s design features make it impossible to draw concrete conclusions about the drug’s efficacy.


 “Believe me, there’s no one who wants an amyloid therapy to work more than me,” he said. Tanzi was the first to clone the amyloid gene and named the amyloid precursor protein in 1987. “It kills me to say all of this, but you got to say what it is, right?”


 Wall Street was not impressed with the less-than-anticipated findings, either. By close of market on Thursday, shares of Biogen had fallen 12%.


 The drug only outperformed placebo in one of the five doses—the highest dose, which was 10 mg given biweekly to 161 patients. In that group, only 30% of patients had a gene called APOE4, which triples one’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Meanwhile, 71% of patients in the placebo group had the APOE4 gene. Biogen and Eisai say that split is the result of a recommendation (but not requirement) made in 2014 by a regulatory agency in another country. The other dose groups had similar percentages of APOE4 patients to the placebo group.

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 Because the cognitive functioning of patients with the gene tends to decline faster, Tanzi said, the positive result at the highest dose—which had the fewest patients with APOE4—raises doubts that the benefits can be attributed solely to BAN2401.


 The silver lining, he added, is that the second highest dose group—10 mg, which was given monthly to 253 patients—had a more equal APOE4 distribution and also saw positive cognitive improvement. Though the finding was not statistically significant, Tanzi thinks the trend is promising.


 Neither Biogen or Eisai have announced whether they plan to conduct a Phase 3 trial, which would take years to complete.


 Haeberlein says that Biogen and Eisai will take the data to regulators, like the FDA, for guidance on the next steps. Early approval is “theoretically one outcome,” she said. “But there are other outcomes of an additional trial needed and what might that trial needs to look like.”


 Photo credit: Biogen

The study&#x27;s design has raised questions about the efficacy of the new drug, known as BAN2401.

In 2016, the world lost 39 million acres of tropical forests–an area roughly the size of Florida.

We Lost a Florida's Worth of Tropical Forests in 2017

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 For tropical trees around the globe, last year was the second worst year in recorded history.


 According to
 <a href="http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest">
 new satellite data
 </a>
 from the University of Maryland, 39 million acres of tropical forests–an area roughly the size of Florida–disappeared in 2017. The loss, which follows a record-high 41.7 million acres in 2016, adds additional strain on climate change mitigation efforts and undermines recent attempts in rainforest conservation.


 The report showed that Brazil, which accounted for nearly 30% of the overall tropical forest loss, is still the leader in deforestation despite the government’s decade-long battle to reduce illegal logging.


 Other areas of alarm include the Democratic Republic of Congo, trailing only Brazil with 3.7 million acres of forest loss; Colombia, where mining, logging, and farming caused a three-fold spike in deforestation from 2015; and the Caribbean, where islands like Dominica lost a third of its forests after a year inundated with hurricanes and tropical storms.


 The effects of the decline in tropical forests are far reaching, many experts argue. These lush tropical forests are responsible for pulling tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year–nearly 100 tons of carbon dioxide per acre, by some estimates. Deforestation itself is estimated to account for more than 10% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions each year, according to
 <a href="https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/10/405/2018/">
 a 2018 study
 </a>
 in Earth System Science Data.

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 There was a small glimmer of good news in the report. After governmental intervention and international support, Indonesia successfully reduced its forest loss by 60% in 2017. But the success is just one part of the bigger, grimmer, picture. Here’s
 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/climate/tropical-trees-deforestation.html">
 Brad Plumer reporting for the New York Times
 </a>
 on the “tentative bright spot” in the report:

<blockquote>

 In 2016, Indonesia’s government imposed a new moratorium on the conversion of peatland, while Norway pledged $50 million for enforcement. Early signs are encouraging: primary forest loss on Indonesia’s protected peatland dropped 88 percent in 2017, to the lowest level in years. Still, experts said, the real test of success may come when the next El Niño hits.


 But such positive stories tend to be a relative rarity and experts say much more is needed to slow the pace of deforestation. To date, just 2 percent of international financing for activities to fight climate change goes toward forest conservation, said Frances Seymour, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute.


 “We’re trying to put out a house fire with a teaspoon,” she said.

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 The report comes as Norway hosts the
 <a href="https://www.norad.no/en/front/thematic-areas/climate-change-and-environment/oslo-redd-exchange/oslo-redd-exchange-2018/working-papers-otff-2018/">
 Oslo Tropical Forest Forum
 </a>
 this week, where 500 forest experts and policymakers are meeting to address how protecting forests can contribute to meeting the Paris Agreement climate goals. On the agenda is combating illegal logging, mining global financial data to reduce drivers of deforestation, and exploring jurisdictional approaches to forest preservation.

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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/rimuhosting/7580990856/">
 pbkwee / Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
 </a>

The loss follows a record-high 41.7 million acres in 2016, adding additional strain on climate change mitigation efforts and undermining recent attempts in rainforest conservation.

Artist’s conception of a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE). The background is a Hubble Space Telescope image of Arp 299, a pair of colliding galaxies.

Extraordinary Star-Swallowing Event Aids Detection of Mid-Sized Black Holes

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 For decades, the scientists charged with the task of detecting black holes faced a bit of a Goldilocks problem.


 These experts had discovered luminous supermassive black holes with masses as large as billions of Suns in the center of most galaxies. In our own galaxy, they’d found one with a mass four million times that of our sun. They had also established strong evidence of the existence of smaller, more common black holes, called stellar black holes, that range from five to 100 times the mass of our sun. In the Milky Way alone, it’s now estimated that there are around 10,000 stellar black holes lurking in the cosmos.


 But sizes in between these extremes have long escaped observation by astronomers. Until now.


 Thanks to a rare telltale sign of radioactivity and decades’ worth of archival data from a global network telescopes, scientists
 <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0493-1">
 have captured
 </a>
 the best-ever evidence of the elusive mid-size black hole—thought to be the missing link in our understanding of black hole evolution. The discovery, published in
 
 Nature Astronomy
 
 , could help researchers better fill in gaps on the birth and behavior of black holes.


 “It is definitely quite exciting,” says Dacheng Lin, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire and lead author of the paper. “Before, a few candidates were identified, but they were either too far away or found too late. This is the best intermediate-mass black hole candidate observed so far.”


 These mid-size black holes have previously eluded detection because they are neither as luminous as the heavyweights at the center of galaxies nor as common as the smaller stellar black holes. They also tend to be located in star clusters at sites devoid of gas, leaving them with little fuel to consume and thus little radiation to emit. The confluence of these circumstances made them virtually impossible for scientists to spot.


 However, scientists can get help in detecting this elusive type of black hole with the help of an unknowing accomplice. That help comes in the form of a nearby star, which, in passing too close, gets sucked into the black hole and subsequently devoured. This process shreds the star, but it activates the black hole to emit an enormous flare of radiation—a signature of sorts observable from Earth. The only problem with relying on these events, called tidal disruption events (TDEs), is that they only happen roughly once every 1,000 years.


 “It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” says Lin. “You shouldn’t expect to see it in your lifetime.”

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 Instead of waiting around for these rare celestial events to happen, Lin and collaborators sifted through decades of archival data from one of the largest telescopes in the world, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, to see whether they could identify one that happened in the past. “Fortunately, we found one and we’re lucky because it has a lot of good data,” says Lin.


 Their luck came in the form of X-ray data collected from a galaxy nearly 740 million light-years away, taken in 2006 and 2009 as part of a massive XMM-Newton galaxy survey. In these data, which were further confirmed with data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Swift X-Ray Telescope, the researchers found evidence of a black hole with an enormous flare of radiation from a TDE on the outskirts of the distant galaxy.
 
 `
 
 By measuring the radiation at different times—and at each time point, analyzing the distribution of photons over energy—Lin and the team of collaborators began mapping the density of their discovery. They found that the black hole had a mass of around 50,000 times that of the Sun: the size of an intermediate-mass black hole. But that wasn’t the only noteworthy finding.


 “There were two points about the discovery that I was really excited about: not just that the data fit, but that the location was off the center of the galaxy,” says Ronald Remillard, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of the paper. “We are so used to thinking, for external galaxies, that there will be a very massive black hole in the center. That’s the part that I hadn’t really visualized and thought through: that they can be way off the center and we can learn from them. It’s the first really good case that it has the potential to be a window into intermediate black holes.”

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 Both Lin and Remillard hope this approach—detecting intermediate black holes via TDEs and using a global network of retrospective data—opens the door for further discoveries of the existence of intermediate-mass black holes.


 “People were getting frustrated, wondering why there weren’t some out there,” says Lin. “Now, there’s this expectation that there should be quite some more out there.”


 These mid-size black holes could be the key to better understanding the hierarchy of black hole evolution and how they influence other galactic phenomena. For example, one popular theory is that these mid-size black holes are the “seeds” of supermassive black holes, and that by comparing their X-ray emissions with the large amounts of data we already have on supermassive black holes, scientists can fill in missing intermediary information in current models of black hole lifespans. This, in turn, may even be able to provide new insights into the formation of entire galaxies, says Lin.


 “These are really very fundamental questions of studying black holes,” says Lin. “And we now have very high-quality data to help answer them.”


 Image credit: Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF; NASA, STScI

Until recently, scientists had only been able to observe luminous, supermassive black holes and smaller, stellar black holes. But now, they&#x27;ve found the missing link between them.

Women More Likely to Have Strokes Than Men

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 The medical community all but threw a party for itself when it recently announced that strokes had declined by nearly 40 percent in the last two decades. A recent study threw cold water on that, showing that only about half of us should be celebrating.
 

 The study, published in the September 2017 issue of
 
 Neurology
 
 , analyzed data on 1.3 million men and women in Ohio and Kentucky from 1993 to 2010 and found that the decrease in stroke over time was primarily driven by a decrease in ischemic stroke in men.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/brain.width-990_6GuGuzL.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Women have more atypical stroke symptoms and worse post-stroke outcomes than men.
 
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 “It was fairly surprising that, when you look at statistical significance, the decline in women between 1993 and 2010 was not significant whereas in men it was,” said Dr. Tracy Madsen, lead study author and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Brown University.
 

 The age-adjusted study challenges the long-held assumption that stroke prevalence is higher in women than men due to their longer life expectancy, a major risk factor of strokes.
 

 “I think that [age] is an oversimplification of the sex differences in stroke epidemiology,” Madsen said. “Even after we adjusted for age, the rates were still declining to a lesser extent in women than men.”
 

 The study is the first to show significant sex differences in stroke incidence over time, and some experts warn it may be too early to draw concrete conclusions.
 

 “Papers like this do highlight the differences between the two sexes, and I do think there’s something real there,” said Dr. Emer McGrath, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital not affiliated with the study. “At the same time, I think it needs to be replicated and validated in another study before we necessarily say it’s true.”
 

 The study joins a growing body of recent evidence on gender disparities in stroke. Studies show woman have more atypical stroke symptoms—such as body pain, migraine, and confusion—and are less likely to be prescribed statins, “a cornerstone of stroke prevention,” Madsen said. Plus, they have worse post-stroke outcomes than men—things Madsen witnessed first-hand as an emergency medicine physician.
 

 “I was seeing a lot of women come in with either atypical symptoms or maybe with delayed presentations, like they had had symptoms for a day or two and decided not to seek care right away,” Madsen said. “Seeing these patients end up with fairly poor outcomes and residual deficits got me thinking about what the differences [by sex] were.”
 

 Madsen found that while the evidence of sex differences in stroke was mounting, so were the gaps in research.
 

 “There’s a lot more literature on cardiovascular disease in women than there is on stroke,” Madsen said. “I thought this was an area of need to really catch the research up so we had a better idea of what stroke looked like in women and how to improve outcomes.”
 

 Madsen teamed up with researchers of the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Stroke Study, an ongoing prospective study that since 1998 has analyzed stroke rates by race, but not specifically sex.
 

 “Not that they weren’t reporting on sex and gender in their other studies, they just didn’t have someone in their group who wanted to look primarily at sex and gender,” Madsen said. “That’s kind of where I came in.”
 

 Experts say the study results could have profound implications on preventative efforts for stroke in women.
 

 “We need to see what’s working and what’s not working and try to understand how we can do better to prevent this disease,” said Dr. Hugo Javier Aparicio, a stroke neurologist at Boston Medical Center. “Stroke is very devastating and has a high mortality rate, so it’s important to stop these things before they happen.”
 

 Currently, Madsen and her collaborators are analyzing data through 2015 to repeat the study, this time with an added age-stratified analysis to see whether the results are only true across certain age groups.
 

 “It definitely takes some time to confirm that all cases are stroke and to ensure that all the data are correct before it’s ready for analysis,” Madsen said. “It’s a very rigorous study.”
 

 For many women, the clock is ticking. Stroke will kill 55,000 more women than men in 2017, according to the CDC, and it won’t wait for the research to catch up.
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://pixabay.com/en/brain-human-anatomy-anatomy-human-1787622/">
 sbtlneet / Pixabay (CC0 1.0)
 </a>

Artist's conception of SIMP J01365663+0933473, an object with 12.7 times the mass and 200 times the magnetism of Jupiter.

Astronomers Discover Incredible Magnetism in Rogue Planet

Twenty light-years away, a massive, magnetic exoplanet without a sun is generating brilliant auroras that would put Earth’s northern lights to shame.


 According to a recent
 <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4365/aac2d5">
 study
 </a>
 in
 
 The Astrophysical Journal
 
 , the rogue planet has a magnetic field almost 4 million times stronger than Earth’s and a mass 12.7 times the size of Jupiter. The discovery marks the first time radio observations and magnetic field measurements have been made of such a body and opens the door for future insights into exploring exoplanetary magnetic fields.

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 Here’s
 <a href="http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/08/free-range-planet">
 Jake Parks, reporting for Astronomy
 </a>
 on how the untethered planet, named SIMP J01365663+0933473, will help astronomers learn more about the universe:

<blockquote>

 “This particular object is exciting because studying its magnetic dynamo mechanisms can give us new insights on how the same type of mechanisms can operate in extrasolar planets,” said [Arizona State University’s Melodie] Kao. “We think these mechanisms can work not only in brown dwarfs, but also in both gas giant and terrestrial planets.”

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 How the sunless planet has such strong auroras, similar to those seen in our own Solar System’s giant planets, remains a mystery.


 Auroras on Earth, known as the northern and southern lights, rely on a constant flow of energetic charged particles coming from the Sun, called solar wind. When these particles near Earth, they’re pulled toward the poles of our planet by our global magnetic field. Eventually, they hit molecules in the upper atmosphere and—bam!—generate beautiful beams of multi-colored light.

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 Jupiter, however, is too far from the Sun to be as strongly effected by solar winds. Its charged particles likely come from its moon Io, which is the most volcanically active world in the Solar System. Researchers believe that SIMP, which has magnetic field 200 times more powerful than Jupiter’s, may also have a moon or other planet as its particle source.


 The discovery may also illustrate a new way to find other elusive exoplanets with no parent star—by tracking them through their auroral radio emission.


 Photo Credit: Caltech/Chuck Carter; NRAO/AUI/NSF

LeBron James, who will join the Los Angeles Lakers next season, with former teammate George Hill.

Could the Physics of Free Throws Have Won the Cavs the Finals?

Last week marked a major shift in NBA history. On Sunday, LeBron James announced that he will leave his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, for a four-year, $154 million deal with the Los Angeles Lakers. The move will dramatically reshape the NBA conference landscape for James, who has faced off with the Golden State Warriors in the past three consecutive NBA Finals—the last of which could have been won with a free throw.


 At the end of Game 1, a free throw by Stephen Curry, who shot 94% from the free-throw line in the playoffs, put the Warriors a single point ahead of the Cleveland Cavaliers. But the Cavaliers soon had their chance to pull ahead. With 4.7 seconds left in regulation, LeBron James, who had an astonishing 49 of the Cavaliers’ 106 points at this time, passed the ball to teammate George Hill. A foul on the Warriors’ end sent Hill to the free-throw line for two foul shots.


 If Hill makes one of the foul shots, the game is tied—two, and the Cavs win.

<h2>

 The Free Throw
 
</h2>

 The free throw is a kind of collective breath holding experience in basketball. The shot has sealed championships and broken other cities hearts. Entire professional players’ careers have been defined by their free-throw performance. Shaquille O’Neal was so notoriously bad at free throws that players purposefully fouled him, coining the term Hack-a-Shaq. O’Neal’s Lakers teammates once gifted him the book Free Throw: 7 Steps to Success at the Free Throw Line.

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 For fans, the shot looks deceptively simple. Its most discernable feature is, after all, that it’s “free:” the other nine players, the shot clock, and “biased” referees are all removed. But basketball, at its core, is a game of trajectories. Therefore, whether the 9.5-inch-in-diameter leather ball soaring 13 feet through the air eventually bounces off the 18-inch-in-diameter iron rim or settles smoothly into the net is largely determined by physics.


 For Larry Silverberg, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at NC State University, solving that physics problem has become a bit of a passion project. Nearly twenty years ago, Silverberg, a dynamist by training and Cavaliers fan by choice, set out to mathematically map the perfect free throw in hopes that science could explain how some of the greats do it.


 “Science explains the mystery, the magic, that superstars have already mastered, even though they often can’t explain it themselves,” says Silverberg. “And that way other people can try to emulate it.”


 He started by distilling the shot into its four most salient features: release height, backspin, arc, and aim. With enough replications, Silverberg knew he could find what combination of these four features had the highest probability of success. So in between teaching classes on mechatronics and applied dynamics, he and a colleagues developed a computer software that simulated the trajectory of a million free throws.


 “I’m an old guy who doesn’t play basketball anymore,” says Silverberg. “So now me and my colleague do this on the computer. It’s much less painful that way.”


 The result—the perfect free throw, according to physics—was to release the ball 7 feet above the ground, at a launch angle of 52 degrees, with 3 hertz of backspin (about three and a half total rotations), aimed at the back of the rim.


 At first glance, the findings seemed to confirm commonly held assumptions, like higher arc is better, but it also poked holes in some long-held teachings in free throw shooting. For example, college coaches that Silverberg talked to thought shorter players should aim for the front of the rim, assuming that aiming towards the back of the rim was reserved only for tall players.

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 “And that’s actually not true,” said Silverberg. “Both tall and short should aim towards the back of the rim. You want there to be less than a 2-inch gap between the back of the ball and the back of rim.”


 Perhaps most notably, the results showed that shorter players don’t have an advantage over taller players, despite the fact that in both the professional and collegiate basketball shorter players have better free throw stats.


 In fact, height and free throw percentages seem to be negatively correlated in the NBA. Some of the greatest NBA centers of all time are also the worst free-throw shooters. Wilt Chamberlain, a four-time NBA MVP, averaged nearly 50 points a game, but only made 50% of shots from the line—the second worst percentage in the history of the NBA. Once a coach famously told Chamberlain: “If you were a 90% shooter, we’d never loose a game.”


 Yet Silverberg’s findings show height is actually an advantage in shooting free throws. The reason being as simple as the ball doesn’t have to go as far through the air.


 “You would think it would not make that much of a difference but 5’ instead of 7’ it is a couple of percent difference,” says Silverberg. “The shot is 13 feet from the basketball. Two feet is more than a 10% difference. Every little bit makes a difference.”


 Silverberg also solved the age-old debate about who is better at free throws: men or women. Statistics from the NCAA show that the average free throw percentage for both genders has hovered around 70 percent for the last 30 years. But it’s long been thought that women had an advantage since they use a smaller ball.


 However, the two balls are pressurized to the same level, which makes the smaller women’s ball bouncier, therefore less forgiving against the iron rim. Female players, on average, also tend to be shorter than their male counterparts—another disadvantage. Taking these factors into account, three years after they started the study, Silverberg and colleagues published a paper showing that female players in the NCAA are three percentage points better at free throws.


 “No woman I have told that to is surprised by that,” Silverberg says. “They all say, ‘It took you 3 years to figure that out?’”

<h2>

 Game 1
 
</h2>

 Back at game 1 of the NBA Finals, George Hill of the Cavs is on the line. Hill is 6-feet 2-inches tall, and usually a high-70s free throw shooter. But this playoff season, he’s shooting 81% from the line. Hill dribbles the ball three times on the line, spins it in his hands, and releases. It goes in. The score is now 107-107. Hill stays on the line, ready for his next shot.


 Game one of the NBA finals is akin to the New Hampshire primary in presidential elections; it sets the tone, foreshadows how well the teams are matched, and gives the victor the momentum. That is to say, there was more than Hill on the line.

<h2>

 More at Play Than Physics
 
</h2>

 Silverberg originally set out to map the physics of the free throw but in doing so proved that there is more than physics at play on the free throw line. So why are the players who are at a mathematical disadvantage better free throw shooters?


 The answer is that they’ve developed something else: consistency


 “It’s probably psychological,” says Silverberg. “It’s probably because if you’re short and you’re out on the basketball court, you have to try harder. The tall guys, they feel like they deserve to be out on the court. You never see a short player on the basketball court who doesn’t hustle.”


 If hustle and grit explain why shorter players and female players fare better at free throws, which is more important: the physics (the form of the shot) or consistency (how much players practice)?

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 There are two lines of reasoning. On one hand, knowing the best mathematical shot is important to know what to practice. If two players practice the same amount, the player who is consistent at the best shot may become a 90% shooter; the player who is consistent at a worse shot may still be a 70% shooter.


 On the other hand, for players that need a lot improvement—the Wilt Chamberlain and Shaquille O’Neal types who shoot just 50%—a better strategy may be to switch to a new form entirely, one that is easier to get consistent.


 A perfect example is NBA Hall of Famer Rick Berry. Berry was the greatest free-throw shooter in NBA history when he retired. He shot 90% from the free throw line. In one season, he missed only 9 free throw attempts. And he did so shooting underhanded, or “granny style.”


 But Berry’s success is not because he cracked the code to the physics of the perfect form. The ball is released too low in underhanded shots, according to Silverberg’s simulations.


 “The underhand shot is actually a worse shot, but it’s easier to be consistent,” says Silverberg. “If you look at person doing underhand shot, the motion of the body is a very smooth, single motion. You rock the ball and then you just release it. It’s one motion and very very simple.”


 As a result, players can practice a more consistent shot. Silverberg has even recommended to some college coaches that shooters switch to underhand if the problem is consistency.


 “No one has taken me up on that,” says Silverberg. “No one wants to do underhand. It’s very difficult to get players to do underhand. I think it’s the sissy thing. The guys feel like they’re sissies.”


 This, it seems, has been a common occurrence for Silverberg. He’s talked to head and assistant coaches about his research, received feedback on what questions they want answered, tweaked the algorithms, but very rarely have the results changed anyone’s behavior. He admits he knows that there are investments with “bigger payoffs” than free throws, like, physical conditioning.


 “We obviously do it fun because no one would ever pay us money to do this,” says Silverberg. “We’re not bitter that the world doesn’t center around this.”

<h2>

 Knowing the Score
 
</h2>

 Back at Game 1, Hill readied to take his second foul shot. Again, he dribbled three times, spun the ball, and released. This time, however, the ball ricocheted off the front of the rim and back into play.


 Fortuitously, Hill’s teammate, JR Smith, got the rebound. For a moment, it looked like the Cavs may get a second chance. However, in what will go down in Cavalier infamy, presumably thinking his team was ahead instead of tied, Smith dribbled to half court to stall. The move sent the game into over time, where the Cavs would go on to lose 114-124. Seven days later they would lose the series.


 Physics may be able to explain the shots, but sometimes just knowing the score helps too.


 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/edrost88/40585183012/in/photolist-26Coecx-27GAiGz-Ff2QbP-23wW5RF-FeYSPv-FeZdwM-23wUsar-2298iBQ-24U48mi-Ff2LDt-24U5xh2-23PgLPS-23PjvyA-23PjzJj-2297FMo-24U5BnM-23wWxKR-GLgboE-FeZz4D-24QoaGN-2298FXS-FeYXNZ-24U4YZ6-24QkKnQ-23PgBzQ-2297fcf-GLg6zb-24U4128-24U5Ajz-23PgN6Q-24QnJCQ-GLi1Ru-2297e8b-2297Lam-229796s-24U49vH-23wUjuB-23PiU9C-24QnhG1-23PgDhh-2297P6b-24QnEWG-24QnFfY-2297eAA-24U5wfH-23PgsRN-24QmjJQ-23wUhvB-2297K4o/">
 Erik Drost / Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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Basketball is a game of trajectories, which means there&#x27;s a formula for the perfect free throw.

Kelsey Tsipis

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