… It wasn’t just the football that was difficult. It was the language and the culture and the loneliness. The isolation was the worst part. Being away from your family at 17, and being surrounded by grown men, by legends, by a manager like Sir Alex … it was very complicated. When people wonder why talented young footballers don’t make it abroad, I can assure you it usually doesn’t have anything to do with their technical quality. There’s always a lot more going on that you don’t see. The first two years I was in England, there were so many nights when I would come home from training and in Manchester it would already be dark outside at four in the afternoon, and I would be in my flat all alone. It was depressing. Then, of course, my mother would call me, and I’d lie and say, “Oh no, it’s going great, Mum. Everything is great.”
But it wasn’t going great. It was shit. I wanted to quit and come home to Spain. I remember during that time, my father always said something to me that was extremely important.
Katie Ledecky, the five-time gold medalist, 14-time world champion and the most marketable swimmer in America not named Michael Phelps, turned professional on Monday.
In doing so she will be allowed to tap into considerable endorsement and sponsorship opportunities. In the build-up to the 2020 Olympics, that could mean millions.
It was done, however, begrudgingly because she can no longer compete for Stanford. The 21-year-old just completed her sophomore season, winning two individual NCAA titles, one relay title and helping the Cardinal to consecutive team championships.
… While the signing is recent, the Pirates have been scouting Bae since the middle of 2016, watching his work at high school tournaments in Korea, said Tony Harris, the international scout who supervises the area. Bae played second base at the time, and the Pirates were intrigued by his athleticism and natural movements on the field. Bae’s eventual transition from second base to shortstop, Harris said, made him an even more appealing possibility.
“He continued to develop, which was good, in pretty much every aspect of his game,” Harris said by phone from Korea. “His approach has changed. It looked like he had just started to understand his role a little better as a leadoff guy with speed.”
The Pirates continued to monitor Bae’s progress, following him to Thunder Bay, Canada, in September, where they watched him play with the Korean baseball team in the U-18 Baseball World Cup.
… Gladwell: When you’re reading this book, one of the unexpected things I learned was that we probably spend too much time differentiating among endurance tasks, as opposed to wondering what they all have in common.
Hutchinson: You can look at a spectrum of different activities, cognitive or physical activities, short or long duration. Fundamentally, what a lot of endurance activities have in common is that you have to hold your finger in the flame. You have to resist your impulse to pull it away, [resist] whatever your first impulse is. That is a unifying theme that brings together great athletes and great performers in business and other contexts.
The Origins of Happiness: The Science of Well-Being over the Life Course lays out a sweeping framework for happiness in childhood and adulthood — and explains how policymakers and leaders can implement this knowledge to improve society.
MIT Sloan PhD student George Ward co-authored the book. He explains what makes people happy, what doesn’t, and why it matters.
… The process of remembering information can be broken down into three steps: attention, consolidation and retrieval. Attention is simply noticing the information. Consolidation is the process of storing the information in your brain, usually in the hippocampus, and making connections to the related information that you already know. Retrieval, of course, is when you actively try to recall the information as needed at a later date.
Consolidation is the part of memory that is most affected by sleep. When we sleep, the neurons in our brain light up and make the essential connections that will allow us to later recall the information as needed. If we are not getting enough sleep, it makes sense that our memory may begin to suffer.
Analyzing past failures may boost future performance by reducing stress, according to a new study.
Researchers report that writing critically about past setbacks leads to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and more careful choices when faced with a new stressful task, resulting in improved performance.
The study, published in the open access journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, is the first to demonstrate that writing and thinking deeply about a past failure improves the body’s response to stress and enhances performance on a new task.
This technique may be useful in improving performance in many areas, including therapeutic settings, education, and sports, researchers claim.
University of California-San Diego, Jacobs School of Engineering from
… The team tested the device, a 3D printed portable box connected to 10 small wearable electrodes, on 11 children and one adult volunteer. They found that data collected with the wearable system were comparable to data collected in the clinic with state-of-the-art methods, which are invasive–including a catheter inserted through the patient’s nose. They also found that the stomach’s electrical activity changes not only around meals, but also during sleep, following its own circadian rhythm.
“We think our system will spark a new kind of medicine, where a gastroenterologist can quickly see where and when a part of the GI tract is showing abnormal rhythms and as a result make more accurate, faster and personalized diagnoses,” said Armen Gharibans, the paper’s first author and a bioengineering postdoctoral researcher at the University of California San Diego.
Monitoring in real time what happens in and around our bodies can be invaluable in the context of health care or clinical studies, but not so easy to do. That could soon change thanks to new, miniaturized sensors developed by researchers at the Tufts University School of Engineering that, when mounted directly on a tooth and communicating wirelessly with a mobile device, can transmit information on glucose, salt and alcohol intake. In research to be published soon in the journal Advanced Materials, researchers note that future adaptations of these sensors could enable the detection and recording of a wide range of nutrients, chemicals and physiological states.
Previous wearable devices for monitoring dietary intake suffered from limitations such as requiring the use of a mouth guard, bulky wiring, or necessitating frequent replacement as the sensors rapidly degraded. Tufts engineers sought a more adoptable technology and developed a sensor with a mere 2mm x 2mm footprint that can flexibly conform and bond to the irregular surface of a tooth. In a similar fashion to the way a toll is collected on a highway, the sensors transmit their data wirelessly in response to an incoming radiofrequency signal.
… Really, we know how we should eat, but that understanding is continually undermined by hyperbolic headlines, internet echo chambers, and predatory profiteers all too happy to peddle purposefully addictive junk food and nutrition-limiting fad diets. Eating well remains difficult not because it’s complicated but because the choices are hard even when they’re clear.
With that in mind, we offered friends, readers, and anyone else we encountered one simple request: Ask us anything at all about diet and nutrition and we will give you an answer that is grounded in real scientific consensus, with no “healthy-ish” chit-chat, nary a mention of “wellness,” and no goal other than to cut through all the noise and help everyone see how simple it is to eat well.
Here, then, are the exhaustively assembled, thoroughly researched, meticulously detailed answers to any and all of your dietary questions.
In an American food culture transfixed on convenience, we as individuals are better equipped than the food industry to break the cycle that puts our health in jeopardy, says journalist, food reform advocate, and award-winning author Michael Pollan.
Our willingness to cook more often and to take responsibility for our food choices will bring about substantial changes in a food industry monopolized for decades by mass production of cheap food, said Mr. Pollan, who speaks Tuesday in Toledo as part of the Authors! Authors! series.
“Whenever there’s a problem with the food product — let’s say concern of lack of fiber in the diet or concern about too much sugar in the diet — the processed food system can change their formula and come up with an apparent solution to the problem,” Mr. Pollan said in a phone interview with The Blade from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area. “But it’s usually just another iteration of processed foods, and processed foods are by and large the real problem with the American diet that nobody wants to talk about.
The Conversation, Ruben Meerman and Andrew Brown from
The world is obsessed with fad diets and weight loss, yet few of us know how a kilogram of fat actually vanishes off the scales.
Even the 150 doctors, dietitians and personal trainers we surveyed shared this surprising gap in their health literacy. The most common misconception by far, was that fat is converted to energy. The problem with this theory is that it violates the law of conservation of matter, which all chemical reactions obey.
Some respondents thought fat turns into muscle, which is impossible, and others assumed it escapes via the colon. Only three of our respondents gave the right answer, which means 98% of the health professionals in our survey could not explain how weight loss works.
So if not energy, muscles or the loo, where does fat go?
The NFL is poised to expand two significant technological initiatives during this week’s owners meetings.
Optimism is growing that owners will approve a competition committee proposal that would allow coaches to watch game video on the sideline and in the coaches’ box during games. The committee is also planning to inform teams of a long-awaited decision to release Next Generation data to every team.
Both developments are considered potential game-changers for how teams evaluate players and develop schemes.
The shocking toll of the English domestic rugby season was revealed on Monday with the Aviva Premiership poised to adopt a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to high tackles to stem an alarming rise in concussions.
Figures released on Monday showed that concussion was the most commonly reported match injury for the sixth season in succession, making up 22 per cent of all injuries.
Injuries requiring more than a three-months’ recovery time were also at an all-time high.