5 Thoughts On 'Moving Day' At The Masters
Tiger Woods hits on the fourth hole during the second round at the Masters golf tournament Friday.
Chris Carlson/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Chris Carlson/AP
Saturday at the Masters golf tournament begins with American Patrick Reed holding a two-shot lead over Australia’s Marc Leishman. Reed expertly handled the tricky, shifty winds and slick greens to post the best round of the day Friday – 6 under par 66.
He’s the only golfer in the field to score both rounds in the 60’s. Now that field has been whittled from 87 to 53 following yesterday’s cut. Saturday, nicknamed “Moving Day,” is when the tournament begins in earnest.
Here are 5 things to know as Moving Day begins.
1. Tiger’s Down But Not Out
Pre-tournament publicity for four-time Masters champion Tiger Woods was off the charts – understandably so considering his improbable comeback from severe back problems that threatened to end his career prematurely.
Huge expectations led to Woods being tabbed one of the favorites at Augusta, even though he hadn’t won a tournament since 2013. But his recent second and fifth place finishes were all Tiger fans needed. Alas, the expectations, so far, have proved too huge – his difficult 3 over par 75 in Friday’s second round left him 13 shots behind leader Patrick Reed. “I hit my irons awful today,” Woods said afterwards. “I didn’t control my distance, my shape, my spins. I left myself in bad spots.”
But.
No one is proclaiming the Tiger Woods’ comeback over. Woods reminds eager reporters it was only six months ago he wondered if he’d ever play golf again.
You scan his face now for hints of a grimace after another violent swing, and it’s not there. You look for a limp or a painful bend at the hip with hands on knees – not there. As long as the back fusion surgery he had last year continues to hold him together, Woods insists he will reclaim the game that once left the sports world in awe.
Can he do it the next two days in Augusta? It’s a very tall order even he acknowledged after Friday’s round. He said he has to shoot two rounds in the mid-60’s, while a bunch of really good golfers fall apart. Probably won’t happen. But as he said following his fifth place finish at last month’s Arnold Palmer Invitational in Florida, “If I can play with no pain and I can feel I can make golf swings, I’ll figure it out. I’m starting to piece it together tournament by tournament and each tournament’s gotten a little bit crisper and a little bit better.”
Woods fans are waiting for “crisper” and “better” in Augusta. If it doesn’t happen, at least there’s this – for the first time since April 2015, he made the cut at a major championship and got to play on the weekend.
2. The Leader
Twenty-seven-year-old Patrick Reed has never won a Major Tournament…but there would be some definite symmetry if his first were the Masters, in Augusta, Georgia. Reed went to Augusta State University, where he helped the men’s golf team win the NCAA Division 1 title in back-to-back years: 2010 and 2011.
As Reed’s professional career has evolved, he’s become known as a fiery Ryder Cup competitor. His duel with Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy was a highlight of the 2016 team event
Reed is paired Saturday with Australian Marc Leishman, also trying to win his first major championship. Leishman’s best Masters finish is a tie for 4th in 2013.
3. Champions Are Lurking
For the most part, the Masters always brings out the best in the best. Not surprisingly, there’s tremendous talent right behind Reed and Leishman. Henrik Stenson, McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson and Justin Thomas all have won at least one major title and all are considered among the best in the men’s game.
A big part of the Masters’ allure is its tradition (“unlike any other”) and so what would an Augusta National leaderboard be without champions from the past? On this Saturday they are well represented with Vijay Singh (2000), Fred Couples (1992) and Bernhard Langer (1985, 1993) making the cut as well.
4. The Weather Will Be Frightful
Already the weather has had an impact on this Masters – while the Augusta National Golf course has appeared as picturesque as ever to TV viewers, the winds on Friday turned tricky and inconsistent. Players talked about being thrown off by the shifting breezes and how they sometimes had to wait to hit their ball until the winds resumed blowing in the directions that were expected.
But the Saturday forecast predicts even worse, plus rain. According to golf.com, tournament officials say showers are “likely in the morning, but by the afternoon the weather will turn worse with occasional heavy downpours and the potential for thunderstorms.”
Bad news for Patrick Reed and all those others near the top of the leaderboard – their reward for working so hard and doing so well Friday, is a later start on Saturday. Later and, now it appears, soggier.
During Friday’s broadcast of the Masters on ESPN, commentator and former player Curtis Strange, said, with maybe just a shade too much hyperbole, “with the weather forecast for the weekend, anybody who makes the cut has a chance to win. No telling what will happen.”
One potential advantage to the rain – the water should soften up the greens and make them less treacherous. Perhaps meaning fewer putts gently tapped rolling across and off the greens; or maybe players will have an easier time spinning shots and having them stick on the green rather than scoot off. Too bad defending champion Sergio Garcia won’t be around to take advantage of that. Garcia missed the cut after his golf balls did anything but stick on his disastrous 15th hole during the first round.
5. Who wins? 6 is the magic number
As in six shots behind. According to this chart, players need to be within 6 shots of the lead after Friday to win the Masters. And this 2013 assertion plays out over the following years. In 2014, eventual winner Bubba Watson led after two rounds. In 2015, winner Jordan Spieth led after two rounds. In 2016, winner Danny Willett trailed the leader by 4 shots after two rounds. And last year, winner Sergio Garcia was tied for the lead after two rounds.
So? There are six golfers within six shots of Patrick Reed’s halfway lead of 9 under par. They are Leishman, Stenson, McIlroy, Spieth, Johnson, Thomas. One of these seven men will win the 2018 Masters.
Unless of course Curtis Strange’s prediction comes true, and the rain and wind turn the tournament completely upside down.
Rep. Ro Khanna On Silicon Valley And Facebook
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg heads to Congress next week. NPR’s Scott Detrow talks to Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who represents Silicon Valley.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
This coming week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will sit before House and Senate committees. He’ll be answering questions about how a conservative political firm improperly obtained data about up to 87 million Facebook users. The Cambridge Analytica scandal looks like it may be a tipping point when it comes to how the public and how politicians view social media.
Congressman Ro Khanna is a Democrat, and he represents Silicon Valley in Congress, and he joins us now. Congressman, thanks for coming on the show.
RO KHANNA: Absolutely.
DETROW: So what do you want to hear from Mark Zuckerberg this week? What questions do you think he needs to answer?
KHANNA: Well, I’m glad he’s testifying. I’m glad he’s doing media interviews, and I hope he will come out for well-crafted regulations. I personally have advocated that we need an Internet Bill of Rights. It’s time that tech leaders like Zuckerberg embrace that, including a right to know what your data is, a right to be able to transfer your data, a right to be able to delete your data. There are a number of commonsense provisions that we need enshrined into law.
DETROW: Do you think there’s room, especially in an election year, to get something passed that deals with this?
KHANNA: I absolutely think there is. The reason is that even Republicans and Libertarians will support, I believe, an individual’s right to privacy to their own data. This is a case where technology has moved lightning-fast, and the laws haven’t caught up. There should be some commonsense principles that will assure the American public that their rights are going to be protected online.
DETROW: You know, both political parties have long embraced Silicon Valley, and you yourself got a lot of key endorsements from tech figures, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. But from the beginning, the whole point of social media was to monetize people’s personal data. And in recent years, campaigns have done a lot of bragging about how efficiently they can microtarget voters. So what’s changed here?
KHANNA: Well, I’m still very proud of representing Silicon Valley, proud of having Sheryl’s support, and I think she can play a very constructive role now in articulating the right type of regulation that we need. I guess what I’d say is I still believe in the power of social media. The Parkland kids are using Facebook Live to get their message out and mobilize – and Twitter to help mobilize a new generation. It would be wrong to say, let’s not have social media, when the next generation is being inspired politically by it.
DETROW: Yeah.
KHANNA: But what 2016 showed us is that these technologies can be very dangerous if they are abused.
DETROW: Sandberg and Zuckerberg have both said in recent days that they misjudged this. They focused too much on the positive and not enough on the potential downsides of social media. Do you think Congress misjudged this as well?
KHANNA: I do. I put more blame on Congress. I mean, we shouldn’t rely on 30-year-old entrepreneurs to come up with legal frameworks for protecting our national security or protecting American citizens. This is an area where Congress, I think, has been derelict, and where we need to step up and do our jobs.
DETROW: You know, to the joy and relief of congressional reporters like me, Congress has been in recess over the past two weeks, so you’ve been able to spend a lot of time in your district. And I’m wondering what the mood is there. Is there a circling of the wagons in the tech community?
KHANNA: There’s a sense that tech needs to get out ahead of this – that we need to take the lead on being a positive force when it comes to job creation and when it comes to protecting American citizens. So I think there’s been a social, political awakening of the valley – a recognition that they really need to engage in thinking about the common good and the proper types of regulation to make sure that they safeguard their reputation.
DETROW: That’s Congressman Ro Khanna. He represents California’s 17th Congressional District, which includes a lot of Silicon Valley. Thanks for coming on the show.
KHANNA: Thanks for having me.
Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Could You Fight Off Worms? Depends On Your Gut Microbes
A colored scanning electron micrograph of a parasitic tapeworm. The scolex (head) has suckers and a crown of hooklets that the worm uses to attach itself to the inside of the intestines of its host.
Power and Syred/Science Photo Library /Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Power and Syred/Science Photo Library /Getty Images
Our tummies are teeming with trillions of bacteria — tiny microbes that help with little things, like digesting food, and big things, like warding off disease.
Those same microbes may have another purpose: waging war against worms.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis made the discovery after studying the microbiomes of individuals from Liberia and Indonesia. They found that the guts of individuals infected with parasites share common microbes — even if they live in completely different geographic locations. Similarly, healthy individuals whose bodies can clear out parasites without treatment seem to share a common gut bacteria.
This suggests the gut microbiome can be altered to protect people from becoming infected with parasitic worms, says Makedonka Mitreva, the lead researcher on the study and a specialist in infectious diseases and the microbiome.
“It may be wishful thinking, but maybe we could implement a control strategy after deworming where we strengthen or alter the microbiomes of individuals who are prone to infection,” Mitreva says.
Nearly 25 percent of the world’s population is currently infected with parasitic worms like hookworm, whipworm or roundworm, according to the World Health Organization. The worms are a disease of the developing world, for the most part. They spread when an infected individual defecates outside, leaving behind stool that’s contaminated with eggs. When the eggs hatch, wriggling microscopic worms can latch on to the ankles or bare feet of individuals who walk by.
Once on board, the worms burrow into skin and travel to the gut to feed on blood or other tissues. Symptoms can vary, depending on the number of worms inside a person. In cases of severe infection, people can experience anemia, nutritional deficiencies and impaired growth.
Despite decades of deworming efforts to rid the world of worms, people in developing countries get reinfected often, according to Mitreva.
“Even if the [drug] therapy works and the infection is cleared, the exposure to contaminated soil is so pervasive that new infections are extremely common,” she says.
Mitreva and her team recently analyzed hundreds of fecal samples from infected and uninfected people in Indonesia and Liberia. Samples were obtained once from some individuals, but other participants were followed long-term to see how their microbiome changed over time with or without drug treatment.
Participants’ fecal samples were first tested for the presence of parasites. Then they were studied for their microbes.
Twelve strains of bacteria were significantly associated with parasitic infection in both countries. These included Olsenella, a bacterium that has been shown to reduce gut inflammation when administered as a probiotic. It is also associated with lean versus obese individuals.
In worm-free individuals, the researchers identified a high presence of Lachnospiracae. The same genus was found in individuals that had parasites and were able to clear the infection naturally. Lachnospiracae has been associated with modulating gut inflammation during infections and has also been linked to obesity and protection from cancer.
What does it all mean?
“When the body is infected with worms, it tries to do worm expulsion with an inflammatory reaction,” Mitreva says. “Worms have to fight back to remain in the gut; that’s why worms are known to secrete anti-inflammatory molecules to reduce inflammation.”
Mitreva adds, “Our interpretation is that parasites need a healthy environment for long-term survival. Good bacteria may facilitate parasitic survival, so a bacterium like Olsenella that decreases gut inflammation is helpful.”
P’ng Loke, a parasitologist at New York University who was not involved in the study, says it’s especially interesting that the research found that Lachnospiracae is associated with individuals who can clear our worms naturally.
But that’s just it; it’s just an association, Loke says. The researchers now need to demonstrate that these bacteria actually hurt or help worms.
“Whether the bacterial associations that are identified really do directly affect worm colonization efficiency hasn’t been demonstrated yet,” he says.
Mitreva agrees that more work is needed, but she’s not giving up. In the future, she hopes to use fermented foods to plant worm-defending microbes inside of individuals to build their defense against worms.
That may be easier said than done.
“I don’t think anyone knows how to really alter the microbiome at the moment. That’s probably the ‘dream’ rather than a near-term possibility,” Loke says.
