The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com. What if there was a way to predict the future? Not all of it, but one little, potentially terrible piece of it? And what if, through that knowledge you could make the outcome a little bit less terrible? New research published this week in JAMA, which is an international peer-reviewed medical journal, provides evidence of just such an opportunity.