A new series is being released following Arsenal’s Héctor Bellerín during gruelling medical interventions, recovery programmes and his comeback from a devastating injury – including never-before-seen footage of the club’s 2019/20 FA Cup triumph. [video, 1:14]
Footballers may be back on the pitch, but making sure they were ready for matches? They were on Zoom doing burpees like the rest of us. Trent Alexander-Arnold, a new ambassador for Therabody, goes through how 2020 allowed him to switch up his health routine
the TNT on court mic’d up conversation between the two and then Green’s detailed postgame explanation on why he wants to put Wiseman in tough spots like that [video, 2:17]
It is well known that a neuron is the main cell of the nervous system. It generates electrical pulses as large as 0.1Volts, has sprouts — axons (as long as 1 meter) and dendrites (several millimeters), and lives more than 100 years. You will not find another more marvelous cell in the body. Still, I will not write about biological details (despite how interesting they are). Rather, I will try to define the most important computational principles, which might help with the progression to artificial intelligence (AI).
Convergence towards principles always leads to simplification and generalization, but it can be dangerous. The brain is too diverse. You can simplify too much and lose something important. Let’s dare to try. Ultimately, it is an iterative process. We merely want to become less wrong with time.
Our brains experience significant changes in blood flow and neural activity during sleep, according to Penn State researchers. Such changes may help to clean out metabolic brain waste that builds up during the day.
“We studied the sleep patterns of mice during both rapid eye movement and non-rapid eye movement sleep stages, as well as in different alertness states,” said Patrick Drew, Huck Distinguished Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, Neurosurgery and Biomedical Engineering.
At some point in your life, you might have heard the phrase: “What is not defined, cannot be measured. What is not measured, cannot be improved. What is not improved, is always degraded”. This sentence highlights the importance of measuring variables. In this sense, measurement is as important as the test chosen to do so. Not all tests assess the same parameters, which makes it difficult to choose the right one.
The functional assessments of players has traditionally been done through laboratory tests, which require specialised personnel and equipment that increase its cost. Also, these are individual tests, so the time needed increases when a group is to be assessed. These limitations, as well as the fact that most tests are not specific for football, have led to the development of field tests in the last few years that allow assessing the physical condition associated with football, reflect the real demands of this sport, and at the same time it involves less time and money.
… Davyeon Ross, the co-founder of a technology that uses analytics to help produce better shooting, jokingly played the capitalist when asked about Kentucky’s poor shooting this season.
“They should be using ShotTracker,” he said with a chuckle. He immediately added that he was joking and not intending to criticize UK’s program or drum up business.
Ross co-founded ShotTracker. It tracks where and when players take shots and other factors that affect shooting accuracy. It does this with sensors placed on the ball, attached to the players’ jerseys or shoes and a third that makes a three-dimensional map of the court.
Kentucky’s women’s team uses ShotTracker.
Daniel Boise, the director of player development and now an interim assistant coach, said the UK women’s program has used the technology for about three seasons.
Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/sports/college/kentucky-sports/uk-basketball-men/article248515105.html#storylink=cpy
EurekAlert! Science News, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) from
Researchers from Skoltech and the University of Texas Medical Branch (US) have shown how optoacoustics can be used for monitoring skin water content, a technique which is promising for medical applications such as tissue trauma management and in cosmetology. The paper outlining these results was published in the Journal of Biophotonics.
(swelling caused by fluid accumulation) or dehydration, which can also have cosmetic impacts. Right now, electrical, mechanical and spectroscopic methods can be used to monitor water content in tissues, but there is no accurate and noninvasive technique that would also provide a high resolution and significant probing depth required for potential clinical applications.
The NHL announced that it will stop using pucks with imbedded tracking technology for the foreseeable future due to complaints about their performance during the start of the 2021 season.
Paper-based rapid diagnostic tests, such as immunochromatographic assays, namely lateral flow immunoassay (LFA), are valuable alternatives for biomarker detection compared to traditional laboratory-based tests, but these assays need further refinement to consolidate their biosensing capabilities. Nanozyme integration into LFA systems may provide a reliable means of improving the analytic sensitivity of LFA tests. Due to the involvement of multiple liquid-handling steps, the quantitative accuracy is compromised, hence hindering the use of untrained personnel point-of-care use. Self-assembling allochroic nanocatalyst (SAN) assemblies satisfy these LFA quality measures by optimizing analyte-antibody reporting performance and by intrinsically catalyzing chromogen activation, thereby reducing the number of liquid handling steps involved during sample analysis. In SANs, the hydrophobic chromogens serve as peroxidase substrates that self-assemble into nanoparticles at high loading fractions. These features demonstrate the potential for SAN-LFAs to be a valuable patient point-of-care (POC) test. Herein, we describe the SAN fabrication process and employ SAN-LFAs to detect cardiac troponin I-troponin C (cTnI-TnC) and myoglobin (Myo) levels present in plasma samples. Using SAN-LFAs, the limits of detection for cTnI-TnC and Myo were 0.012 ng/mL and 0.2 ng/mL respectively. We also demonstrate SAN compatibility with blood samples and stability under long-term storage conditions. The successful utlization of SANs in LFA-based biomarker detection may inspire these nanocatalysts to be integrated into similar immunochromatographic testing methods.
Recent AI research has pointed out the synergies between touch and vision. One enables the measurement of 3D surface and inertial properties, while the other provides a holistic view of objects’ projected appearance. Building on this work, researchers at Samsung, McGill University, and York University investigated whether an AI system could predict the motion of an object from visual and tactile measurements of its initial state.
“Previous research has shown that it is challenging to predict the trajectory of objects in motion, due to the unknown frictional and geometric properties and indeterminate pressure distributions at the interacting surface,” the researchers wrote in a paper describing their work. “To alleviate these difficulties, we focus on learning a predictor trained to capture the most informative and stable elements of a motion trajectory.”
… Dr. Matt Provencher, FOX Sports’ injury expert and the former team physician for the New England Patriots, said there has been a 5 to 8 percent increase in Achilles tears among NBA players the past two years, according to 15 years of data that his company, Proven Performance Technology, has analyzed.
“There’s certainly a slightly higher incidence of it,” Provencher said. “It’s hard to say why.”
Plasma and tissue sulfur amino acid (SAA) availability are crucial for intracellular methylation reactions and cellular antioxidant defense, which are important processes during exercise and in recovery. In this randomized, controlled crossover trial among eight elite male cyclists, we explored the effect of exhaustive exercise and post-exercise supplementation with carbohydrates and protein (CHO+PROT) vs. carbohydrates (CHO) on plasma and urine SAAs, a potential new marker of methylation capacity (methionine/total homocysteine ratio [Met/tHcy]) and related metabolites. The purpose of the study was to further explore the role of SAAs in exercise and recovery. Athletes cycled to exhaustion and consumed supplements immediately after and in 30 min intervals for 120 min post-exercise. After ~18 h recovery, performance was tested in a time trial in which the CHO+PROT group cycled 8.5% faster compared to the CHO group (41:53 ± 1:51 vs. 45:26 ± 1:32 min, p < 0.05). Plasma methionine decreased by ~23% during exhaustive exercise. Two h post-exercise, further decline in methionine had occured by ~55% in the CHO group vs. ~33% in the CHO+PROT group (pgroup × time < 0.001). The Met/tHcy ratio decreased by ~33% during exhaustive exercise, and by ~54% in the CHO group vs. ~27% in the CHO+PROT group (pgroup × time < 0.001) post-exercise. Plasma cystathionine increased by ~72% in the CHO group and ~282% in the CHO+PROT group post-exercise (pgroup × time < 0.001). Plasma total cysteine, taurine and total glutathione increased by 12% (p = 0.03), 85% (p < 0.001) and 17% (p = 0.02), respectively during exhaustive exercise. Using publicly available transcriptomic data, we report upregulated transcript levels of skeletal muscle SLC7A5 (log2 fold-change: 0.45, FDR:1.8e−07) and MAT2A (log2 fold-change: 0.38, FDR: 3.4e−0.7) after acute exercise. Our results show that exercise acutely lowers plasma methionine and the Met/tHcy ratio. This response was attenuated in the CHO+PROT compared to the CHO group in the early recovery phase potentially affecting methylation capacity and contributing to improved recovery. [full text]
We like efficiency. When I need to repair a shingle and clean out the gutters, I want to do this in a single trip to the roof. When I do laundry, I move two loads along in each trip to the basement. When my app needs its dependencies upgraded, I upgrade a bunch at once… right?
We like batching. Batching is more efficient doing ten at once is faster than doing one, one, two, one, one, etc. I don’t wash my socks as soon as I take them off, because lumping them in with the next load is free.
Is it more efficient to save the shingle repair until it’s time to clean out the gutters? Unclear.