… When discussing Spurs veterans, Popovich often tosses around the term “corporate knowledge,” which is precisely what Ginobili possesses to go with the leadership, intangibles and playmaking ability that can change the course of a game. … “It’s hard to choose a few [of my favorite moments] because it’s easy to remember the wins, the good moments, the highs,” Ginobili said at the end of the season. “But even the lows were great, too, in a sense of connection, camaraderie, of doing it together. We win it together. We lose it together.
… Aside from a short period of time in late June when he joined the Detroit Pistons summer league team in Orlando, Johnson has been a daily presence at P3.
The decision came before the Pistons’ off-season roster upheaval, but in the aftermath, Johnson returns to the spotlight that greeted him when the franchise passed on Devin Booker and Myles Turner to select Johnson with the eighth pick of the 2015 NBA draft.
And in the short walk to his vehicle after his mid-day workout earlier this month, one word came to mind in the brief talk with Johnson.
The night before a game, Cristiano Ronaldo drinks either tea with honey or milk and takes a very hot bath for about 20 minutes. The routine is as relaxing as it is athletically strategic, because Ronaldo firmly believes that “smart details” like these make the biggest difference in his ability to perform better than, well, arguably anyone at his sport.
Though his workouts are relentless (he’s no stranger to two-a-days), Ronaldo knows that if he wants to be the best he has to master every aspect of his health that affects his performance. “Eat well, stay hydrated and sleep properly,” says Ronaldo. “This has been my focus since I started my career.”
Ronaldo’s 360-degree approach to training is why Nike teamed up with him to launch Nike+ Training Club’s new series of athlete workouts that feature holistic health and motivation tips.
Looking across a crowded theater, most of us can instantly recognize our friends, even if it’s dark or their faces are partly obscured. How exactly does the brain accomplish this feat? New research has uncovered a simple code that neurons use to process facial information.
The findings, published in Cell in June, suggest that the face-processing neurons don’t respond to a specific person. Instead, they encode specific features of faces, such as the distance between the eyes. “This new study represents the culmination of almost two decades of research trying to crack the code of facial identity,” Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), said in a news release. “It’s very exciting because our results show that this code is actually very simple.”
The epiphany hit Phil Wagner about a decade ago when he was stuck in Southern California traffic pouring over reams of data in his car and he realized how he could take information about how athletes jump and land and predict where they are most susceptible to their next injury.
Wagner has turned that idea into a leading company in the growing field of sports science analytics as teams seek whatever edge they can to keep their players on the field instead of in the operating room.
Sparta Science tracks athletes making six jumps in 90 seconds with its force plate technology and proprietary software to predict what injuries they’re in danger of suffering, what workouts they need to stay healthy and what sport or position best suits their athletic ability.
Stiff neck, headache, tingling in your fingers. You list your symptoms, answer a few questions about how long they’ve lasted and whether they seem to be getting worse. Then, without ever leaving home or queueing at the clinic, you get the diagnosis: a strained neck. Or, at least, eight out of 10 people with those symptoms have one. (You also learn that 1 in 1000 people with these symptoms turn out to have degenerative cervical spine disease. Would you like to have your case reviewed by a human doctor? That will be £14.99.)
This isn’t some future scenario. The free app Ada, which offered up this diagnosis, was launched in the UK in April. It took six years for 100 data scientists to train the artificial intelligence behind Ada, using real medical records. So far, more than 500,000 people have used it. And with each case it sees, it gets a bit smarter.
Ada is one of several AI-driven apps to hit the market in the last few months, and they are set to shake up healthcare.
Medium, Conversations with Tyler, Tyler Cowen from
… Our team here is actually deploying a version of a wearable, which is turning on the sensors in your phone to track patients after surgery, to see whether we can define how long their recovery pathway is, how long before they are back in their normal sleep habits, or back mobilized and moving around much more. I think that ability to have knowledge of the well-being of people that goes beyond whether you had a complication or a death. Success of what we do for people can be enormously improved followed by wearables. And then that creates these incredible learning loops, where we can maximize those right-now-invisible indications of the outcomes of care.
So I think the wearables are being used on the diagnostic side, where it’s semi-powerful but not critical, as part of how you’re doing in your care and whether we’re helping you achieve the goals—very powerful. [audio, 57:32]
As Romelu Lukaku’s transfer to Manchester United drew to a close and the papers announced that, ‘a deal has been agreed, subject to a medical,’ it suddenly dawned on me that if Lukaku fails his medical, he may not become a Manchester United player. But then, what were the chances of him failing his medical? It’s not that he had just started playing football. In fact, it is very rare when you hear that a player has failed one. So then, is it time for clubs to do away with the medical?
Leroy Hood knows a thing or two about disruptive technologies. One of biology’s living legends, the now 78-year-old scientist played an influential role in the development of the first automated DNA sequencer. He pioneered systems biology, the study of interactions of molecular networks, and still leads an institute devoted to it in Seattle, Washington. His latest vision is “scientific wellness,” which aims to improve health and prevent disease by combining personalized behavior coaching with DNA and blood testing, activity tracking, and other measures.
Hood unveiled the concept 3 years ago, but a pilot study attempting to back it up has only now appeared. He and colleagues have compiled what Hood calls “personal, dense, dynamic data clouds” for 108 people after tracking them for 9 months. Included in the data clouds are their full genome sequences; blood, saliva, urine, and stool samples taken every 3 months that measured levels of 643 metabolites and 262 proteins; and physical activity and sleep monitoring. The massive data set may have helped people avoid diabetes and other health issues, the researchers suggest. Indeed, Hood intends to move forward with his previously proposed 100K Wellness Project, for which he hopes to recruit 100,000 people for by 2020. The study also spurred Hood to co-found a company called Arivale, which now offers similar services coupled to monthly coaching, with a first-year membership price of $3499.
Participation in some sports, including soccer, wrestling and elite-level long-distance running, may increase your risk of getting arthritis of the knees, researchers say.
“While the typical athlete is not at a greater risk of knee osteoarthritis, it was interesting to see that certain athletes may be more likely to have knee osteoarthritis later in life, specifically, elite and non-elite soccer players and elite-level long-distance runners, elite-level weight lifters and elite-level wrestlers,” lead author Jeffrey B. Driban from Tufts Medical Center in Boston told Reuters Health by email.
Runner's World, Sweat Science blog, Alex Hutchinson from
The “Wet Test,” in which you assess the shape of your wet footprint to determine if you have high or low arches, has somewhat fallen out of fashion in running circles in recent years.
It used to be that people with low arches were assumed to be “overpronators” and were assigned motion control shoes, while people with high arches were assigned cushioned shoes. But in parallel with the rise of minimalism around 2010, a series of studies found that this type of shoe prescription didn’t seem to reduce injury risk. These days, you’re more likely to hear advice along the lines of “Buy a shoe that feels comfortable to you when you run.”
But the dismissal of arch height’s prognostic value may have been a bit premature. For example, a more rigorous 2016 study from Luxembourg, which included disguised “placebo” shoes, found that motion control shoes did reduce injury rates, particularly in those with low arches.
As Manchester United prepare to face Real Madrid on Sunday, Jose Mourinho has told ESPN FC that English clubs must still overcome huge obstacles if they are to have any prospect of overcoming the likes of the Spanish giants to win the Champions League.
United, who return to the Champions League this season following their Europa League triumph against Ajax in May, also meet Barcelona at FedEx Field in Maryland before flying back to England next week.
Mourinho’s men played 64 games in all competitions last season — a workload which forced the United manager to rest players for league games against Arsenal and Tottenham in the final weeks of the campaign — and the two-time Champions League winner with Porto and Inter Milan insists that the fixture list continues to work against the hopes of the Premier League’s top clubs in Europe.
You’ve heard the (perhaps apocryphal) quote from Bill Parcells before. “You are what your record says you are,” has some element of truth behind it, yet the phrase fails to tell the entire story. If records were the best measure of future performance, we wouldn’t see upsets like the 7-9 Seahawks stunning the 11-5 Saints during the 2010 playoffs.
In many cases, the simplest or most traditional statistic tells either an imperfect story or a fraction of the bigger picture. In trying to break down football games and understand which elements of performance correlate best with winning, I’ve come to rely on a toolbox of statistics and concepts that give me a better sense of what’s actually happening on the field. Let’s go through them and understand why they work (and where they come up short), starting with broader team metrics.
Speed is the fundamental constraint on animal movement, yet there is no general consensus on the determinants of maximum speed itself. Here, we provide a general scaling model of maximum speed with body mass, which holds across locomotion modes, ecosystem types and taxonomic groups. In contrast to traditional power-law scaling, we predict a hump-shaped relationship resulting from a finite acceleration time for animals, which explains why the largest animals are not the fastest. This model is strongly supported by extensive empirical data (474 species, with body masses ranging from 30 μg to 100 tonnes) from terrestrial as well as aquatic ecosystems. Our approach unravels a fundamental constraint on the upper limit of animal movement, thus enabling a better understanding of realized movement patterns in nature and their multifold ecological consequences.
Movement is one of the most fundamental processes of life. The individual survival of mobile organisms depends on their ability to reach resources and mating partners, escape predators, and switch between habitat patches or breeding and wintering grounds. By creating and sustaining individual home ranges1 and meta-communities, movement also profoundly affects the ability of animals to cope with changes in land use and in climate. Additionally, movement determines encounter rates and thus the strength of species interactions, which is an important factor influencing ecosystem stability. Accordingly, a generalized and predictive understanding of animal movement is crucial.