As Steve Nash is enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame, close friends from childhood through to the NBA open up about what makes the kid from Victoria so special.
… Ansah’s talent was raw when the Lions made him the No. 5 pick in the 2013 draft out of BYU, a relative football neophyte after picking up the game in college following playing soccer, basketball and track growing up in Ghana. It became refined working with Kris Kocurek his first four years, creating a Pro Bowl appearance in 2015 and 44 sacks since 2013. Only 10 players brought down opposing quarterbacks more in that span.
Of those 11, Ansah reached his mark in the fewest amount of snaps. Which leads to the conundrum for Detroit. When Ansah is on the field and healthy, he’s one of the most dominant pass-rushers in the game, the reason Detroit gave him the franchise tag heading into this season. But that’s the key – when he’s healthy.
While Ansah has missed only seven games over his first four years, he has been consistently hampered by injuries. It’s why, when he does talk with the media, usually one of the first questions asked is something along the lines of “How are you feeling?” or “How’s your (insert-a-body-part-here)?” Ansah usually gives a non-answer. But yo
Olivia Moultrie and her family are challenging long-held assumptions about the best way to develop an American women’s soccer star. U.S. Soccer and the University of North Carolina are among those watching closely.
England are enjoying a period of rare success across the age groups but what’s the key? With the help of former England youth coaches, Adam Bate looks at how the country made changes to its youth coaching by encouraging players to become problem solvers.
… The Nets have continually upgraded and expanded the team. As NetsDaily wrote last week, there are more than 10 staffers, many with PhD’s in various aspects of the training culture. And it also includes a number of international experts who’ve worked in World Cup soccer, the NFL, Olympic alpine skiing, Major League Baseball and Australian rules football. And yes, there are a number of staff from the Spurs “tree.”
“Bringing in outside people that have worked outside of basketball, that have worked out of mainstream sport if you will, to bring in a better understanding of sports science and how we can integrate it and collaborate together as a group,” Weatherford told Leung. “Because, people from different aspects from around the world, it just helps us grow and look at things a little bit differently [than] we feel as a staff.”
Indeed, the directors of sports science, Dan Meehan, and sports medicine, Les Gelis, are Australians and Stefania Rizzo, Director of Performance Rehabilitation, is Canadian.
… The majority of these ACL tears — nearly 73 percent according to a recent study — are non-contact injuries. Unlike a contact ACL injury where blunt force trauma to the knee or surrounding area stresses the ACL beyond its capacity, a non-contact ACL tear points to to some underlying cause(s).
After rummaging through numerous possibilities, three were bouncing around in their seats yelling, “Ooooo, pick me! Pick me!”
SB Nation, Stars and Stripes FC, Donald Wine II from
… D.C. United offering Spanish classes at the request of David Ousted and Russell Canouse is a step in the right direction for MLS. Expanding the linguistic palate of English-speaking players will only help them in their careers. Steven Goff highlighted that Spanish is the most prevalent MLS foreign language, with over 21% of the league’s players coming from nations where Spanish is the first language. Still, MLS has become a global league, with players here speaking dozens of languages.
The Philadelphia Union is another team that has offered language courses to English speakers on the team, while Chivas USA offered Spanish classes to non-Spanish speakers when they were in existence, allowing team members to assimilate with the Mexican roots that the team held close. Other teams have also offered English courses to non-English speaking players, but few have gone the other way to offer classes in Spanish or other languages.
… wearables have come back into favor. However, this time around their makers are openly touting their medical-grade capabilities, to the extent of casting those capabilities as the devices’ raison d’être.
And nobody has moved more briskly to take advantage than the companies who coordinate and run clinical trials.
“[Wearables] that collect information are definitely being used. Some companies are getting very comfortable deploying them in clinical trials,” says Nelia Padilla, VP, global services global lead, digital health at IQVIA, noting “even Fitbit” has pushed forward on this particular front.
Enthusiasm around wearables within the clinical trial realm has more or less been fueled by what you’d expect: Data from these devices is culled directly from the user, rather than from the user’s own reports or recollections, or some other potentially error-prone third party. “In a lot of therapeutic areas, they’re using wearables to collect information that has never been collected in the past,” Padilla explains. “You have the potential to actually see differences, in terms of [how] not all studies do the same thing.”
Online commerce has made it easier than ever to shop, right? Maybe too easy. A recent study by comparison-shopping site Finder revealed that more than 88 percent of Americans admitted to spontaneous impulse buying online, blowing an average of $81.75 each time we lose control. Clothes, videogames, concert tickets. One in five of us succumb weekly. Millennials do it the most.
“The main emotion that people feel after this impulsive spending is regret,” says Jennifer McDermott, a consumer advocate for Finder. While it’s not an impartial estimate, Finder calculates that we spend more than $17 billion on impulse buys—which is a lot of regret.
So McDermott’s team decided to help us rein in our impulses. They created Icebox, a Chrome plug-in that replaces the Buy button on 20 well-known ecommerce sites with a blue button labeled “Put it on ice.” Hit it and your item goes into a queue, and a week or so later Icebox asks if you still want to buy it.
In essence, it forces you to stop and ponder, “Do I really need this widget?” Odds are you don’t.
This is a lovely example of what I’ve come to think of as “friction engineering”—software that’s designed not to speed us up but to slow us down. It’s a principle that inverts everything we know about why software exists.
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ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (AU) from
Researchers have developed a revolutionary method to ‘print’ large-scale sheets of two dimensional piezoelectric material, opening new opportunities for piezo-sensors and energy harvesting.
Importantly, the inexpensive process allows the integration of piezoelectric components directly onto silicon chips.
Until now, no 2D piezoelectric material has been manufactured in large sheets, making it impossible to integrate into silicon chips or use in large-scale surface manufacturing.
r. Pieter Cohen studies the borderline between drugs and ingredients billed as botanicals in dietary supplements. In one instance, his research led the Food and Drug Administration to crack down on weight-loss supplements illegally containing BMPEA, a compound chemically akin to amphetamine and linked to serious health risks. Its makers claimed it came from a Southwestern shrub but evidence pointed to its synthetic origin.
Cohen’s latest target is the stimulant higenamine, an ingredient listed on the labels of weight loss and sports supplements. Working with a public health team from the Netherlands and an international testing lab, the Harvard Medical School associate professor studied 24 products containing higenamine. The amount on the label was never the same as the amount found in the bottle, the team found in a study published Thursday, and the serving sizes also varied, from trace amounts to 110 milligrams per day.
“There are situations where you find something that is present in plants, but at a high-end dose, it becomes a drug,” said Cohen, who is also an internist at Cambridge Health Alliance.
Can the copycat league imitate the defending Super Bowl champs? According to Jeffrey Lurie, Doug Pederson, and others, they can invest in analytics, be aggressive in free agency, go for it on fourth down, trade for players on rookie deals, find a backup who’s good enough to put up 40-plus points, build two of the best lines in football, build one of the best staffs in football, and, oh yeah, find a superstar signal-caller on a rookie deal.
What would happen if we started thinking of National Football League players as workers, who might be in harm’s way as they huddle, tackle, fumble and crash to the amazement of millions of viewers in the United States?
That’s one one of the provocative questions that Adam Finkel, clinical professor of environmental health sciences at University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, recently addressed in two publications.