In today’s pace-and-space NBA, competent defenders are more valuable than they’ve ever been, thanks to the unprecedented level of shooting and the sheer number of versatile players who double as unicorns. Ideally, a defender gets as physical as he can without fouling the shooter. And at a minimum, he should sprint toward the player with an outstretched arm, throwing off the shooter’s rhythm and concentration and potentially forcing a misfire.
But what if getting closer to the shooter doesn’t make any real difference?
That is the conundrum of guarding a Kemba Walker 3-pointer.
Like plenty of young wide receivers, Chris Godwin grew up admiring Calvin Johnson.
He watched his games, he mimicked his catches, but never did Godwin imagine being in the spot he was earlier this month, face-to-face with one of the best pass catchers of his generation while preparing for the NFL combine.
Godwin, who led Penn State to an 11-3 record this year and finished third in the Big Ten in receiving yards, spent time working out and watching film with the retired Detroit Lions receiver at the EXOS training facility in Gulf Breeze, Fla.
… What exactly did Sakho do to make his career tank so rapidly?
If you follow European soccer, you probably know that the sample Sakho submitted after that March 17 match tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. You may faintly recall hearing that the charge was later dismissed for some reason. But unless you’re a die-hard Liverpool fan or a fervent chronicler of doping cases, you probably never heard why.
Sakho’s case is an example of how doping charges are rarely the black-and-white, good versus evil dichotomy they’re portrayed to be. You probably never heard much about Sakho’s case because it’s hard to make sense of it. Sometimes, doping cases are messy.
A few years ago, researchers at Colorado College tested the effects of “placebo sleep.” Volunteers received fictitious feedback from a sleep-monitoring device about the quality of their previous night’s sleep; those who were told they had slept well scored better on a series of cognitive tests than those told they had slept poorly – regardless of their actual sleep quality.
The results underscore how hard it is disentangle the physiological effects of sleep from our expectations and hang-ups about it. For shift workers, ultra-endurance athletes and even jet-setting executives, missing sleep is a confidence-sapping occupational hazard with both mental and physical consequences. The solution? It turns out you can ward off some of the effects by “banking” extra sleep in advance, according to recent research.
Imagine an $850,000 piece of equipment, one so special that it’s one of only two of its kind in the entire world. Then imagine a guy, who not only has a degree in exercise physiology, but two more in nutrition and biochemistry, operating that machine.
Then picture yourself running, swinging a golf club or tennis racket on that virtually priceless piece of equipment. Now take it a bit further and visualize that guy with the three degrees analyzing every move and step you make and take on that uniquely rare machine, so that every single time you exercise in the future, you do it more efficiently, safely and productively.
Well, imagine no more.
Thanks to the ongoing support of Dr. Robert Wilder, an accomplished marathon runner and UVa’s Chair of Physical Medicine, and under the watchful, analytical eyes of Max Prokopy, all of this continues to be a reality right in our backyard.
Just two years before he began tearing up college basketball, two years before he became the leading scorer on a national championship contender, and two years before he appeared in NBA mock drafts as a potential lottery pick, TJ Leaf could barely walk.
He wasn’t injured in the traditional sense. There was no one play that caused him to hobble, no anguished howl on the court hours earlier. But as he trudged out of the gym, Leaf was in pain.
“After every game, after every practice, it was almost just hard to walk back to the car,” he recalls on a recent Monday afternoon. “Sophomore, junior year, it was terrible.”
In between games during the middle years of his high school career, Leaf sometimes wasn’t even able to practice. He’d sit off to the side with ice bags on both knees.
When you want to learn something new, you practice. Once you get the hang of it, you can hopefully do what you learned—whether it’s parallel parking or standing backflips—on the next day, and the next. If not, you fall back to stage one and practice some more.
But your brain may have a shortcut that helps you lock in learning. Instead of practicing until you’re decent at something and then taking a siesta, practicing just a little longer could be the fast track to solidifying a skill. “Overlearning” is the process of rehearsing a skill even after you no longer improve. Even though you seem to have already learned the skill, you continue to practice at that same level of difficulty. A recent study suggests that this extra practice could be a handy way to lock in your hard-earned skills.
Openwater’s Mary Lou Jepsen is disrupting MRI with wrist – worn optoelectronics. Described at ApplySci’s Digital Health + Neurotech conference at Stanford – February 7, 2017
A new computer program is helping surgeons view their patients’ medical scans in three dimensions, enabling better planning for surgeries on people with unusual anatomy. The program can transform a series of two-dimensional CT or MRI scans into a 3-D image that surgeons can rotate, examine, cut and reassemble from any angle, helping them anticipate exactly what they’ll see at every stage of surgery.
For a recent story, cardiothoracic surgeon Katsuhide Maeda, MD, who led the first procedure using the technology at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, told me why it was helpful to view patient Gina Milner’s cardiothoracic anatomy in three dimensions before her heart valve replacement surgery.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Nitish Padmanaban et al. from
From the desktop to the laptop to the mobile device, personal computing platforms evolve over time. Moving forward, wearable computing is widely expected to be integral to consumer electronics and beyond. The primary interface between a wearable computer and a user is often a near-eye display. However, current generation near-eye displays suffer from multiple limitations: they are unable to provide fully natural visual cues and comfortable viewing experiences for all users. At their core, many of the issues with near-eye displays are caused by limitations in conventional optics. Current displays cannot reproduce the changes in focus that accompany natural vision, and they cannot support users with uncorrected refractive errors. With two prototype near-eye displays, we show how these issues can be overcome using display modes that adapt to the user via computational optics. By using focus-tunable lenses, mechanically actuated displays, and mobile gaze-tracking technology, these displays can be tailored to correct common refractive errors and provide natural focus cues by dynamically updating the system based on where a user looks in a virtual scene. Indeed, the opportunities afforded by recent advances in computational optics open up the possibility of creating a computing platform in which some users may experience better quality vision in the virtual world than in the real one. [full text]
eat all the time — first breakfast, second breakfast, lunch, pre-dinner, dinner, dessert.
That’s often chalked up to a fast metabolism. But “fast metabolism” is a bit of a misnomer. There are a handful of factors that play into how quickly the body digests food and how much energy it burns while doing so.
Physical activity — both exercise and unconscious activity, like leg jiggling — affects the overall metabolic rate. So does food choice. Eating 1,000 calories of cake doesn’t kick the metabolic rate into gear the same way eating 1,000 calories of grilled chicken.
In the new episode of “Boddities,” we dive into the science of metabolism.
Gelatin is an unusual substance, one often derived from animal materials: the skin, bones, and connective tissues of fish, pigs, chicken, and cows. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Yet it’s something we eat all the time, in flan, Jell-O, panna cotta, soups, and many other foods. According to a new study, gelatin may be just what you need for healthier joints.
A team of researchers at Keith Baar’s Functional Molecular Biology Laboratory at the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences paired up with scientists from the Australian Institute of Sport to research the effects of gelatin on the human body. They found eight healthy young men to participate in a study that examined what happened when they took a vitamin C-enriched gelatin supplement before performing high-impact exercise.
After the exercise, the participants were tested for certain amino acids that indicate the body is using the collagen in gelatin to build tendons, bones, ligaments, and other connective tissues. The researchers discovered that the gelatin supplement increased these amino acids and other markers, indicating that the body was indeed using the gelatin to produce the collagen needed to strengthen connective tissue.
Every year, the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference Research Paper Competition brings exciting and innovative insight and changes to the way we analyze sports. With submissions on topics ranging from the spelling bee to rugby, basketball, and more, we represent the largest forum for groundbreaking research in sports. The Research Paper Competition is an incredible opportunity to reach a diverse audience while still contributing to the advancement of analytics in sports.
… in the raucous dressing room, the coach discusses how well the team executed their game plan, most notably in the corner that made it 2-1. He talks about working hard during the week and maintaining concentration during key moments. He congratulates the goal scorer, and then comes one of the most satisfying 30 seconds of my career.
I remember the words like they were spoken yesterday: Pointing to me and my colleague, the manager who asked us for our input three months before shouts, “And you two fuckers, well fucking done boys. Don’t think for a second your work goes unnoticed!”
The team cheers, we’re doused in water, energy drinks and even a few chicken nuggets.