Leaning on his crutches, just six days after reconstructive surgery on his right knee, Mikko Koivu was asked if he had concern about his ability to return to the Minnesota Wild next season at age 36.
Just as if he were corralling a puck with a quick flick of his stick on a faceoff, Koivu didn’t flinch.
“Yes, I’m totally confident. I think those are just numbers,” Koivu said. “I think it’s about your effort, the way you take care of yourself on and off the ice, and at the end, it’s going to be a battle. But if you’re strong enough, you’re going to be able to do it.”
When Michael Fulmer was directed to a back field at Tiger Town after his bullpen session on Tuesday morning, he assumed he was heading there for fielding practice.
“I didn’t know this was going to be cardio,” he said afterwards.
It was both, as the Tigers’ right-hander was pushed physically on the first day of training for pitchers and catchers. Fulmer fielded bunt after bunt as the team tried to ease him into spring training.
Oskar Svendsen, Espen Harald Bjerke and Bjørn Dæhlie share something besides the fact they’re all Norwegian: they’re the three athletes (one cyclist, two cross country skiers) with the highest recorded VO2max scores of all time. Indeed, if you look at the VO2max records more closely, you’ll also notice that of the top 10 results, seven are from Scandinavia and most of those are from Norway.
Number four in the ranking is former Team Sky rider Kurt Asle Arvesen (Norway), followed by Greg Lemond (USA), Killian Jornet (Spain, runner), Matt Carpenter (USA), Tore Rud (Norway, skier), Gunde Swan (Sweden, skier) and Harri Kirvesniem (Finland, skier). Scroll even further down the ranking and you’ll notice the quota is massively monopolised by Scandinavians.
So why are Scandinavians, and Norwegians in particular, so gifted in terms of VO2max tests? Have they all inherited a genetic ability that tends towards a high VO2max? Or is it due to the environment they live and train in? Finally, does a high VO2max translate into race success?
NBA commissioner Adam Silver has opened the annual All-Star Technology Summit by touting the “smart jersey of the future.”
Silver used an app on a phone to change the number and name on the back of a jersey that was displayed on the side of the stage where he spoke, flipping it from a Kemba Walker model to a Stephen Curry model to a Michael Jordan model. Silver laid out what a fully customizable fan experience may look like in the NBA in 2038, right down to changing the names on the jerseys those fans wear to games.
But on Tuesday, a day before pitchers and catchers were scheduled to report to Maryvale, Milwaukee Brewers players were almost dumbstruck at the sight of their new spring-training home.
From the gigantic and luxurious clubhouse, to the weight room that would rival many NFL teams’, to the numerous hydrotherapy pools and the air-conditioned batting tunnels, the $60 million renovation of what is now known as American Family Fields of Phoenix was met with universal praise from its new primary tenants.
“When I came in I was like, ‘Wow.’ One word: Wow,” said first baseman Jesús Aguilar. “They did this thing in nine months? Wow. They moved quick.”
Like so many pitchers in Major League camps, Orioles hurlers have extra sets of eyes on them this spring. The Edgertronic cameras, perched on tripods, are set about a stride’s length beyond the backfield bullpen mounds at the club’s Ed Smith Stadium complex, as conspicuous as the coaches standing cross-armed behind them.
The pair of lenses qualify as two of the more notable additions in a camp full of fresh faces, and they’ve documented upwards of a thousand pitches thrown by Orioles this spring in painstaking detail. The club spent much of its first week in Florida rotating pitchers in front of the high-speed cameras, which produce ultra slow-mo images of each pitcher’s delivery, before sending those pictures to a row of laptops lining the bullpen wall. Pitchers need only to throw, then turn around for immediate feedback.
“As pitchers, we kind of have an idea of what our ball does, but there are times when what you’re doing is actually counter-intuitive to what you’re trying to do,” said starter Alex Cobb. “Seeing it broken down changes your perspective, helps your mind wrap around what’s happening with the ball more clearly.”
… Personal information is currently collected primarily through screens, when people use computers and smartphones. The coming years will bring the widespread adoption of new data-guzzling devices, like smart speakers, censor-embedded clothing, and wearable health monitors. Even those who refrain from using these devices will likely have their data gathered, by things like facial recognition-enabled surveillance cameras installed on street corners. In many ways, this future has already begun: Taylor Swift fans have had their face data collected, and Amazon Echos are listening in on millions of homes.
We haven’t decided, though, how to navigate this new data-filled reality. Should colleges be permitted to digitally track their teenage applicants? Do we really want health insurance companies monitoring our Instagram posts? Governments, artists, academics, and citizens will think about these questions and plenty more.
And as scientists push the boundaries of what’s possible with artificial intelligence, we will also need to learn to make sense of personal data that isn’t even real, at least in that it didn’t come from humans.
Smart mattress company Eight Sleep is announcing its newest product today, The Pod. Co-founder and CEO Matteo Franceschetti described it, succinctly, as “Nest for your bed.”
Eight has been focused on bed temperature for a while, first by offering a smart mattress cover and then a smart mattress that allows owners to adjust the surface temperature and even set different temperatures for different sides of the bed. But The Pod goes even further, with a smart temperature mode that will change bed temperature throughout the night to improve your sleep.
The Atlantic, Object Lessons, Andrew Bomback and Michelle Au from
Wearable medical technology promises a new, and better, way to manage personal health. Whether it’s Fitbits counting steps and calories burned, continuous blood glucose monitors aiding insulin dosing for diabetic patients, or Bluetooth earpieces offering round-the-clock heart rate and body temperature tracking, wearable devices sell the promise of the coldly clinical made portably intimate. Continuous EKG monitoring, like that available in the latest Apple Watch, might seem like a small technological leap, putting what was once the sole purview of hospitals and doctor’s offices neatly around a consumer’s wrist.
But continuous EKG monitoring is a little different from other, more discrete medical information. Unlike devices that measure more cleanly numerical metrics—step counts or target heart rates or blood glucose levels—a wearable EKG display doesn’t give the user an easy sense of hitting targets or falling short. Reading an EKG tracing is nuanced and interpretive, more art than math. A Fitbit gives you a number. An EKG paints a picture.
Forget BMI! Shapewatch is an innovative 3D body visualization tool developed by the University College Ghent, Global Scanning and QuantaCorp. It enables users to scan their body, monitor key biometrics and see their body shape in 3D, thus motivating them to go for their fitness goals and improve their healthy lifestyle habits.
Six research teams will receive a total of $100,000 through the NCAA Innovations in Research and Practice Grant Program, designed to enhance college athletes’ psychosocial well-being and mental health.
The program is aimed at funding projects that will bring tangible benefits to college athletes when used by individuals or by NCAA member schools’ athletics departments. This year’s grant recipients will produce work that touches a wide range of areas, including first-year transition, career readiness, international student-athlete well-being and social media literacy.
A panel that reviewed the 87 proposals and selected the grant awardees represented all three NCAA divisions and was composed of athletics administrators, scholars, current and former student-athletes, a mental health clinician, a student affairs professional and a faculty athletics representative.
… Today, we’re announcing new steps we intend to advance to achieve these twin goals. These steps include communicating to the public as soon as possible when there is a concern about a dietary supplement on the market, ensuring that our regulatory framework is flexible enough to adequately evaluate product safety while also promoting innovation, continuing to work closely with our industry partners, developing new enforcement strategies and continuing to engage in a public dialogue to get valuable feedback from dietary supplement stakeholders.
The opportunity to strengthen the framework that governs dietary supplements couldn’t come at a more pivotal time. On the one hand, advances in science and the growth and development in the dietary supplement industry carries with it many new opportunities for consumers to improve their health. At the same time, the growth in the number of adulterated and misbranded products – including those spiked with drug ingredients not declared on their labels, misleading claims, and other risks – creates new potential dangers.
Injuries, changes in pitcher usage, and a heightened awareness of prospect-success rates have shifted the way talent evaluators view the best up-and-coming arms in baseball
A U.S. investment group taking over a Danish soccer club plans to recruit and nurture young American players before selling them on within Europe.
Soccer investor Jordan Gardner told me the ownership group hoped to close a deal for FC Helsingør, a club in Danish soccer’s second tier, within a few weeks.
Gardner, who already owns minority stakes in Irish side Dundalk and English Championship team Swansea City, spoke about his vision for the club, including being a pathway to European soccer for young U.S. talent.
“We picked Denmark for a variety of reasons,” Gardner told me in an interview.
“A. It’s the strongest league in Scandinavia. B. Everyone speaks English, so cultural integration for players from North America is relatively easy. C. Helsingør’s proximity to Copenhagen, which is obviously a major European hub in terms of moving players on. And D. The biggest piece of it is there are Americans already proving the model of what we’re trying to do in Denmark.