With his seemingly effortless victory in the Olympic Marathon steambath in Japan, Eliud Kipchoge ended the debate. There’s no longer any question that he’s the Greatest Of All Time (GOAT) at the distance. How do you argue against a guy who has won back-to-back Olympic golds, holds the official marathon world record (2:01:39), and has covered 26.2 miles in an “exhibition race” in 1:59:40?
You don’t. That leaves one endlessly intriguing question: Why? Why is Kipchoge so much better than everyone else?
… It feels as though Dele has, perhaps, lost that fun in his play, as though six years of the on and off-pitch intensity of elite football has ground it out of him. A factor could be the way the game has changed so quickly: in his successful years the 4-2-3-1 formation was popular, and he appeared to have found the perfect role in the middle of the attack.
But the 4-3-3 took over and Dele is neither a natural winger, nor does he seem as effective in a central midfield three, even though in his early days he was a box-to-box midfielder. And if anyone can squeeze the fun out of a footballer it is Jose Mourinho, his manager last season.
The 8 rights:
1. To play sports
2. To safe, healthy environments
3. To qualified program leaders
4. To developmentally appropriate play
5. To share in planning & delivery of activities
6. To equal opportunity for personal growth
7. To be treated w/dignity
8. To enjoy themselves
Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate a potential psychological mechanism of green exercise on perceived stress. More precisely, it was analyzed whether the relationship between the natural environment of physical activity and perceived stress was mediated by recovery experiences, namely by psychological detachment and relaxation. An ecological momentary assessment approach was used, meaning that specific recovery experiences were assessed directly in real-life situations and multiple times.
Materials and methods: Thirty five women and 27 men took part in the ecological momentary assessment study over seven days (Mage = 32.30 years, SD = 10.23, 53% had a degree from a university or a university of applied science). If participants were involved in PA lasting at least 10 min on a given day, they had to answer questionnaires on the smartphone both prior to the activity and immediately afterwards. Perceived naturalness, psychological detachment and relaxation were assessed after physical activity events, whereas perceived stress was measured before and after each physical activity event. A two-level mediation analysis was conducted. The direct and indirect effect of perceived naturalness on perceived stress after engagement in physical activity was analyzed on the within- and between-person levels.
Results and conclusion: Results showed that the relaxation as a recovery experience served as mediator between perceived naturalness and perceived stress after engagement in physical activity, but only on a within-person level. This means that the more natural a given individual appraised the physical activity environment, the more relaxed he or she felt during physical activity (β = 0.322, p < 0.0005). Furthermore the more relaxed the individual was, the less stress he or she perceived after exercising (β = −0.221, p < 0.0005). The psychological detachment as a recovery experience in contrast, did not serve as mediator, neither at the within- and the between-person level. Considering the indirect effect of perceived naturalness on perceived stress and the importance of relaxation experiences, current findings suggest that research should put greater emphasis on examining the specific psychological mechanisms of green exercise to make even better use of its beneficial effects in the future. [full text]
Circadian clocks control the timing of many physiological events in the 24-h day. When individuals undergo an abrupt external shift (e.g., change in work schedule or travel across multiple time zones), circadian clocks become misaligned with the new time and may take several days to adjust. Chronic circadian misalignment, e.g., as a result of shift work, has been shown to lead to several physical and mental health problems. Despite the serious health implications of circadian misalignment, relatively little is known about how genetic variation affects an individual’s ability to entrain to abrupt external changes. Accordingly, we used the one-hour advance from the onset of daylight saving time (DST) as a natural experiment to comprehensively study how individual heterogeneity affects the shift of sleep/wake cycles in response to an abrupt external time change. We found that individuals genetically predisposed to a morning tendency adjusted to the advance in a few days, while genetically predisposed evening-inclined individuals had not shifted. Observing differential effects by genetic disposition after a one-hour advance underscores the importance of heterogeneity in adaptation to external schedule shifts. These genetic differences may affect how individuals adjust to jet lag or shift work as well. [full text]
Advanced in vitro models of human skeletal muscle tissue are increasingly needed to model complex developmental dynamics and disease mechanisms not recapitulated in animal models or in conventional monolayer cell cultures. There has been impressive progress towards creating such models by using tissue engineering approaches to recapitulate a range of physical and biochemical components of native human skeletal muscle tissue. In this review, we discuss recent studies focussed on developing complex in vitro models of human skeletal muscle beyond monolayer cell cultures, involving skeletal myogenic differentiation from human primary myoblasts or pluripotent stem cells, often in the presence of structural scaffolding support. We conclude with our outlook on the future of advanced skeletal muscle three-dimensional cultures (e.g. organoids and biofabrication) to produce physiologically and clinically relevant platforms for disease modelling and therapy development in musculoskeletal and neuromuscular disorders. [full text]
The Stanford Daily student newspaper, Anoushka Kumar from
… “One of the key principles that we established is to run the Alliance as an open scientific project,” Delp said. “The best way to advance science is by making our insights, data, models and software available to the scientific community, and to the world at large. We’re here to use science in the service of society.”
Like Delp, Joy Ku M.S. ’98 Ph.D ’04 sees the Alliance as a body for collaboration. Ku has spent decades building communities for different research centers in biomedicine, and she now serves as the Alliance’s lead for education and outreach. She believes that Alliance’s innovation projects focus directly on facilitating cooperation between athletes and researchers.
“I think we are just at the beginning of this very exciting endeavor, and I would encourage everyone, whether you’re a clinician or a student-athlete, to see how you can engage with us,” Ku said.
Locker rooms often operate as critical access points for individuals participating in organized team sports and other physical activities. Like bathrooms, locker rooms typically offer just two options; spaces for men and women that are clearly delineated under the assumption that users will be both cisgender and heterosexual. The guiding notion is that these users are incapable of sharing spaces of non-sexualized nudity.
With the aim of imagining a more inclusive locker room experience, Gensler partnered with Athlete Ally, a nonprofit committed to championing the rights of the LGBTQI+ community and ending homophobia and transphobia in sports, to produce The Inclusion Utopia: Promoting a More Equitable and Inclusive Experience for Athletes. The article was co-authored by Santiago Rivera, Northeast regional leader of Gensler’s Foundations, Associations and Organizations practice, and Amanda Ramos, Gensler’s Innovation Director. AN spoke with Rivera to gain a better understanding of the project.
While concussions are serious, collegiate student-athletes who are diagnosed quickly and treated thoroughly are more likely to make full recoveries and return to play. According to Jacob Resch, associate professor of kinesiology in the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development, this standard is achieved in many circumstances, but not all.
“As we continue our research into the clinical needs student-athletes have after a concussion, it is also important that we examine the processes in place and resources available to ensure all collegiate athletes are safe on the field of play,” Resch said.
Last year, Resch reviewed six years’ worth of data collected about UVA student-athletes who were diagnosed with a sports-related concussions. Though the data are revealing a number of important details, what they found when they reviewed concussion recovery time for female student-athletes was of immediate interest.
Columbia University, Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute from
In 2013 neuroscientist Franck Polleux got a call from his colleague Dietmar Schmucker in Belgium, who had noticed something strange while studying the development of brain cells (neurons, specifically) in flies. Switching off a single gene, which until then had been associated mostly with hypertension and kidney function, led to serious defects in an insect’s neurons.
Now, after 8 years of collaborative experiments, Polleux and Schmuker’s teams have discovered just how critically important this Wnk gene (and a related pair of Wnk genes in mice) is for neurons’ development and maintenance in the adult brain. As reported on August 11 in Neuron, Wnk genes (pronounced “wink”) help young neurons grow the long branching projections (axons) that carry information in the form of electrical impulses around the brain and body. Surprisingly, the scientists also discovered that Wnk keeps fully formed axons intact in the adult brain.
I have 3 thoughts here that I’ll put in a brief thread:
1. My personal inclination is to think this paper’s conclusions are correct. Limited capacity (10-30%), mostly-outdoor games pre-delta probably didn’t contribute to large amounts of COVID spread. (1/4)
… Brentford have accelerated past some of their alumni. They pocketed profits for Chris Mepham, Ryan Woods, Romaine Sawyers, Jota, Scott Hogan and Moses Odubajo, who are all now in the Championship; in going, they facilitated the Bees’ rise. The exception to the rule may be John Egan; the Irishman’s former club are a division above him now but, unlike the others, he feels good enough to play for them now.
But there is a second group of Brentford old boys, who suggest their scouting and coaching enables them to identify and improve players to such an extent that they can become hugely effective Premier League performers. They include Ollie Watkins, Said Benrahma, Ezri Konsa, Stuart Dallas and James Tarkowski, most of whom developed further again after leaving Griffin Park.
And there are reasons to suggest that, aided by bigger budgets and greater pulling power, Brentford have been able to upgrade even when their trading left them in the black. Three Premier League attacks offer a comparison: perhaps Ivan Toney, the man currently charged with providing the sting for the Bees, will outscore a predecessor, the profligate Neal Maupay, though he will do well to be more prolific than another, in Watkins.
Alex Morgan was just seven years old when the 1996 Olympics took place in Atlanta. She watched Michelle Akers and Julie Foudy lead the US to the first-ever Olympic gold in women’s soccer, in front of 80,000 electrified fans. Foudy would not know of Morgan – now one of the most feared forwards in the world – for another decade, but she knew the world, including many young girls like Morgan, was watching.
“We approached the Olympics as here’s this wonderful opportunity and there’s no way – NO WAY – that someone’s gonna take that,” Foudy said in a video for Team USA.
Elsewhere at Atlanta ‘96, US point guard Jennifer Azzi and her teammates donned their gold medals, beaming from the Olympics’ highest podium after an exhilarating 8-0 run to the title. All the while, 13-year-old Sue Bird collected a dozen new role models and an infinite dose of possibility.
