… At 33, Votto was the best hitter in the NL last season. After a down 2014 season, in which he was limited to 62 games, he’s shown no signs of aging– if anything, he has improved, “aging” like a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild.
But he shouldn’t be improving. That’s weird. He should be showing some signs of skill decay. But instead, he posted his fourth-best wRC+ (165) last season, along with the second-best slugging (.578) and home-run (36) totals of his career. He trails only Mike Trout in wRC+ (166) over the last three seasons. All in his age-31 to -33 campaigns.
If anyone is going to challenge expectations and aging curves, and have us rethink what is possible, it’ll probably be either Trout or Votto. But Father Time remains undefeated.
… For a young American facing soccer royalty, “there is no time to reflect,” he said. “If you think about it, ‘Oh, I am actually here’ and give them too much respect, they can kill you. I was just thinking about competing. You learn you have to be ready. In this league, you have to be 100 percent aware of everything all the time.”
Moore earned good reviews, including two 7s on the 1-10 scale issued by various media outlets.
Four days later, he started against Espanyol in a round-of-16 cup defeat. Since then, with veterans Pedro Lopez and Coke ahead of him in the pecking order, Moore has spent most of his recent time with the reserve squad.
Although largely unrecognized by sleep scholars, sleeping is a pleasure. This report aims first, to fill the gap: sleep, like food, water and sex, is a primary reinforcer.
The levels of extracellular mesolimbic dopamine show circadian oscillations and mark the “wanting” for pro-homeostatic stimuli. Further, the dopamine levels decrease during waking and are replenished during sleep, in opposition to sleep propensity. The wanting of sleep, therefore, may explain the homeostatic and circadian regulation of sleep. Accordingly, sleep onset occurs when the displeasure of excessive waking is maximal, coinciding with the minimal levels of mesolimbic dopamine. Reciprocally, sleep ends after having replenished the limbic dopamine levels. Given the direct relation between waking and mesolimbic dopamine, sleep must serve primarily to gain an efficient waking.
Real Madrid are happy to break the world transfer record but they have also invested €100m in building an academy they call ‘the greatest sports facility ever built by a football club’
… A decade ago, Arsene Wenger reckoned that only Sao Paulo produced more professional footballers than Paris, which has only half the Brazilian city’s population, and one top-flight club, Paris Saint-Germain.
Paris is surrounded by social housing projects that breed brilliant footballers. Add to the list above Paul Pogba, Kylian Mbappe, Benjamin Mendy, Riyad Mahrez, N’Golo Kante, Lucas Digne, Nicolas Anelka, Moussa Sissoko, Blaise Matuidi, Adrien Rabiot, Kingsley Coman — they all grew up around Paris. As did Wissam Ben Yedder, whose two goals for Sevilla knocked United out of the Champions League last week.
Several of those players spent their formative years in Les Ulis, an isolated project of mid-20th Century tower blocks, without its own train station, where thousands of immigrant families from Africa and Arabia arrived in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.
Emma McLean tumbled from one corner of the mat to the other, ending her floor exercise with a high double backflip in the pike position.
The University of Michigan gymnast had performed this routine thousands of times, but when she landed, a sharp pain shot up her heel.
“It felt like I went right through the floor, kind of like I landed on concrete,” said McLean, a junior kinesiology major.
X-rays and an MRI revealed the reigning Big Ten Conference champion bruised the soft tissue in her left heel — an injury that sidelined McLean for a couple weeks. She practiced with a standard heel cup to prevent further injury, but it was thick and uncomfortable.
Michigan Athletics then turned to Professor Ellen Arruda, who partnered with U-M engineering technician Andrea Poli to create a custom heel cup using thin, lightweight materials that reduce force and dissipate energy when McLean lands on her feet.
Working up a sweat from carrying a heavy load? That is when the textile works at its best. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have developed a fabric that converts kinetic energy into electric power, in cooperation with the Swedish School of Textiles in Borås and the research institute Swerea IVF. The greater the load applied to the textile and the wetter it becomes the more electricity it generates. The results are now published in the Nature Partner journal Flexible Electronics.
Chalmers researchers Anja Lund and Christian Müller have developed a woven fabric that generates electricity when it is stretched or exposed to pressure. The fabric can currently generate enough power to light an LED, send wireless signals or drive small electric units such as a pocket calculator or a digital watch.
The technology is based on the piezoelectric effect, which results in the generation of electricity from deformation of a piezoelectric material, such as when it is stretched. In the study the researchers created a textile by weaving a piezoelectric yarn together with an electrically conducting yarn, which is required to transport the generated electric current.
Millions of MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, scans are performed each year to diagnose health conditions and perform biomedical research. The different tissues in our bodies react to magnetic fields in varied ways, allowing images of our anatomy to be generated. But there are limits to the resolution of these images—generally, doctors can see details of organs as small as a half millimeter in size but not much smaller. Based on what the doctors see, they try to infer what is happening to cells in the tissue.
Mikhail Shapiro, assistant professor of chemical engineering, wants to make a connection between MRI images and what happens in tissues at scales as small as a single micrometer—that’s about 500 times smaller than what’s possible now.
“When you look at a splotchy MRI picture, you may want to know what’s happening in a certain dark spot,” says Shapiro, who is also a Schlinger Scholar and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator. “Right now, it is hard to say what’s going on at scales smaller than about half a millimeter.”
I’ve been crowing for months about stem-cell treatment and platelet-rich plasma therapy and how it’s been a game changer for my own knees. We’ve recently seen treatment for civilians catch up with what’s been available to athletes.
So, has that gap closed?
Dr. Russ Riggs of Reflex in Portland joined me on the Bald Faced Truth radio show (12-3p on 102.9-FM weekdays) to talk about knee injuries and the advancements in medicine.
“When I went to med school more than 20 years ago we thought platelets were only involved with coagulation; that their only function was to stop bleeding,” Dr. Riggs said. “We now understand that they’re crucial to the healing process. They set up a perimeter, they establish an area, a micro-environment and release all these healing factors.
Transfusing young blood and freezing heads may get most of the anti-aging and life-extension buzz, but don’t count out the molecule hunters: After setbacks and stumbles and what critics called debacles, these scientists are figuring out which biochemicals might potentially, possibly be fountains of youth in pill form.
In the latest advance, biologists reported on Thursday that a molecule already sold by supplement makers (even as scientists scramble to understand it) restored youthfulness to blood vessels in 20-month-old mice, an age comparable to 70 years in people. The research supports the idea that boosting certain genes and molecules that fade with age could keep people functional, resilient, and even spry well into their 80s, even without living longer.
“I think it’s quite an important paper,” said Dr. Eric Verdin, of the California-based Buck Institute for Research on Aging, who was not involved in the new research. “It’s probably not the magic pill everyone is looking for, but it’s one more brick in our efforts to understand aging and healthspan,” or how long people can stay biologically young(ish) even as their birthday candles proliferate.
The only vitamin pill I take these days is vitamin D. Over the years, I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that an isolated micronutrient is generally a poor substitute for the richly complex food it was extracted from, so I try to stick to the original sources for my vitamin needs. Of course, living in Canada makes it hard to do that with vitamin D for much of the year, so I’ve clung to the hope that sunshine can, in fact, be bottled.
Perhaps predictably, an interesting new study just published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology from a group led by Chris Easton of the University of the West of Scotland, hints that there’s more to the picture. Apparently, exposure to sunlight can also affect levels of nitric oxide in your body, which may have interesting implications for both health and sports performance.
… “I am a man of the world,” he offered without prodding.
Maybe. But in soccer terms Osorio, 56, is a “tinkerer,” a label given to tireless experimenters unable to leave well enough alone. In a sport bound by tradition, it’s a label that reads like a scarlet letter — and one Osorio wears as a badge of honor.
He is a proponent of squad rotation, soccer’s version of a platoon system in which he alters lineups for tactical purposes, to keep players fresh and to increase versatility. It’s a controversial approach that has won him few fans in Mexico — where, as a Colombian, he had few supporters anyway — but it has made him Mexico’s most successful national team coach in the last 30 years.
“We have more players playing in two or three positions, which makes the team stronger,” he said after Friday’s 3-0 win over Iceland in a World Cup tune-up. “And we are adapted to play against different styles of football.”
… “The first thing we talk about when we talk about any team or scouting any team is how we’re going to stop them,” guard Clayton Custer said. “We talk about defense. Coach makes sure that we’re locked in on the defensive end. Our coaching staff works harder than anybody I’ve ever seen to know every single tendency of every single player, and we have a specific way of how we want to guard things.”
It starts with charts and sayings. The team has diagrams of each opponent’s offensive set and the matching calls. Let’s say a team is going to run a flare off a screen action. Rambler guards can see it coming and know how to set the defense.
“Yeah, people talk about our spacing and the way we move the ball and how unselfish we are, which I think that that’s expected because we do do a good job of that,” Custer said. “But I think maybe — yeah, our defense is definitely the key to us winning these games.”
… We have, when I came in — you think about where we are, we’re in kind of the epicenter of innovation. And the Niners have always been as a team of innovation. So we’ve got people like Paraag, who handles our cap, but also kind of looks over our strategy. So we’ve got a great research and development — I call it analytics, they don’t like that, they like research and development.
The previous regime wasn’t really using them. I figure as long as they’re here, we’ll see what they can bring. And we found that it’s been incredibly valuable. And we’ve tried to kind of intertwine them in our scouting process. Kyle’s bought into that.
And so, we are using that, but ultimately, we look at the film. One of the things that I mentioned is that Kyle has a great — and his staff, they’ve been together a long time and they’ve run the same system. So they’ve been able to articulate to me, our front office, our scouting staff: here’s the characteristics we’re looking for at each position.
… Think about it: Until Scottie Pippen’s foot surgery that limited him to 44 games in 1997-98, he had missed six games in the five previous title seasons and played in all 82 games three times.
Michael Jordan proved even more durable. He played in all 82 games in four of the six championship seasons and missed just six games in the other two seasons combined.
They weren’t alone. B.J. Armstrong played all 82 games in all three seasons of the first three-peat. John Paxson, Steve Kerr and Ron Harper each posted an 82-game season. Horace Grant missed just 10 combined games during the first three-peat.
That’s a lot of something — luck, toughness, preventative measures, you name it.