Since plummeting from the pinnacle of men’s tennis after the 2016 season, Novak Djokovic has revived and won the past two Grand Slam titles, at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. He’s the No. 1 player in the world and is in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open, where he could set the tournament’s all-time record for men’s titles with the seventh of his career.
So, how is Djokovic, at 31 years old, doing this after struggling for so long? He had minor surgery on his right elbow to address an injury that had been bothering him for two seasons. But he also made a bold decision that may have saved his career: He ditched Andre Agassi and Radek Stepanek as coaches, trashed his new serve motion and went back to his former technique.
Data from the ATP Tour shows how much Djokovic improved last season after he reunited with his longtime coach and serve adviser, Marian Vajda, just before the clay court season began.
Even though the Oklahoma City Thunder come into Saturday’s game against the Philadelphia 76ers (3:30 p.m. ET, ABC/WatchESPN) as losers of five of their past six games, they remain eight games over .500, and there’s still one big reason for optimism.
His name is Paul George.
After signing a massive new deal with the Thunder in the offseason, George is playing terrific basketball, earning every penny and re-establishing the Thunder as serious contenders in the Western Conference.
It all starts with defense. The Thunder have emerged as the best defense in the West thanks in large part to George, who enters tonight’s game as the NBA’s top Defensive Player of the Year candidate.
… “I had a really tough time with the oblique injury I had two years ago and trying to get my mechanics back on track,” Hamels said. “I just don’t think I was able to identify and correct what was going on. I was fighting it the whole season, until I kind of looked at a little bit deeper film and then really just made some more drastic changes, and went with it.”
His oblique injury in 2017 derailed Hamels for the better part of a calendar year. The strain originally landed him on the 15-day DL, but he actually ended up missing eight weeks of games. In the 19 starts after, Hamels posted a 4.42 FIP with a 1.22 WHIP, walking over three batters per nine innings. He admitted to pitching through lingering discomfort at times, instead choosing to try and grit through a game – even if that meant ignoring how it would derail his healing process. As a result, the start of 2018 didn’t treat him much better. It wasn’t until a longer-than-usual film study with the Cubs that Hamels found his fix.
… The Michigan-born teenager who’d gone undrafted in junior hockey’s ranks asked if there was time for a question. Bazin was encouraged, because he likes inquisitive kids who pay attention to detail. “Fire away,” he said.
“Is that good?” Hellebuyck asked, straight-faced, of Carr’s save percentage. “Or should we push for .950?”
Bazin was shocked. He doesn’t recall what he said next, only that he wondered: “Is he crazy or is he that driven?” Says the River Hawks coach today, with a laugh, “I understood after: That’s Connor.”
It has been six years since that moment, and now Hellebuyck is sitting in his stall in the Jets dressing room, one day after making 36 saves in a 7-1 win over the Philadelphia Flyers.
In the spring, I wrote about how J.J. Watt would have a hard time returning to top form in 2018 after playing in just eight games of the previous two seasons due to major injuries — and costing the Texans $29 million against the cap over that time. I cautioned that, if the Houston defensive end was not able to stay on the field and produce double-digit sacks once again, general manager Brian Gaine likely would be forced to ask Watt to take a pay cut. Or, maybe, Watt would have to be traded or released.
I hoped I would be wrong. I hoped Watt, a pillar of the Houston community, would return to his dominant self. I love what he represents as a dedicated player and a class act. But I admitted to being skeptical.
Well, after Watt’s career-high seven forced fumbles, 16 sacks, a fifth Pro Bowl selection and a full 17 games including playoffs, I’m happy to say, “Mea culpa.”
As FC Dallas opened its 2019 training camp at Toyota Soccer Center, a new energy filled the air.
The Gonzalez era had begun.
New coach Luchi Gonzalez — hired in December after Oscar Pareja departed for Club Tijuana in Mexico — and his assistants, Peter Luccin and Mikey Varas, kicked off their first training session with some passing and movement drills.
Many of today’s parents and teachers came of age in the 1980s and 1990s — a time when the self-esteem movement was in its zenith. Self-esteem was supposed to be a panacea for a variety of social challenges, from substance abuse to violent crime. The research, however, did not support such broad claims.
If teachers and parents want children to develop resilience and strength, a better approach is to teach them self-compassion, said Dr. Kristin Neff, a psychology professor at the University of Texas and author of Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. “Self-esteem is a judgment about how valuable I am: very valuable, not so good, not valuable at all.”
In contrast, “self-compassion isn’t about self-evaluation at all,” said Neff. “It’s about being kind to oneself. Self-compassion is a healthy source of self-worth because it’s not contingent and it’s unconditional. It’s much more stable over time because it is not dependent on external markers of success such as grades.”
The British Psychological Society, Research Digest, Christian Jarrett from
How much insight do you have into your own mental and emotional abilities, such as verbal intelligence, spatial cognition and interpersonal skills? Might your friends have a better idea of your strengths and weaknesses than you do? In a new paper in the journal Heliyon, a team led by Aljoscha Neubauer explain that while such questions of self- vs. other-insight have already been looked at in the context of the main personality traits and general IQ, theirs is the first investigation in the context of more specific abilities. It’s an important issue for young people, they add, since choosing career paths that play to our abilities can increase the chances of later success – but it remains an open question whether and for which abilities people should rely on their own judgments or seek the advice of others.
College basketball practice courts now double as laboratories, and Oklahoma believes it’s among the front-runners in a race for technological advantages that are transforming the sport.
OU forward Kristian Doolittle tossed a belt-like contraption to the side of the court Monday in practice. It was his heart rate monitor. Every player wears one under his jersey during practices.
A laptop on a silver cart at one corner of the court is watched by an intern or graduate assistant. The screen is filled with numbers showing how hard every player is working. Players also wear a device in which gyroscopes and accelerometers measure sprints, cuts and the stress being put on their bodies.
“I go over and check sometimes,” forward Rashard Odomes said.
University of Massachusetts Amherst, News & Media Relations from
Many wearable biosensors, data transmitters and similar tech advances for personalized health monitoring have now been “creatively miniaturized,” says materials chemist Trisha Andrew at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but they require a lot of energy, and power sources can be bulky and heavy. Now she and her Ph.D. student Linden Allison report that they have developed a fabric that can harvest body heat to power small wearable microelectronics such as activity trackers.
Writing in an early online edition of Advanced Materials Technologies, Andrew and Allison explain that in theory, body heat can produce power by taking advantage of the difference between body temperature and ambient cooler air, a “thermoelectric” effect. Materials with high electrical conductivity and low thermal conductivity can move electrical charge from a warm region toward a cooler one in this way.
The resolution of acoustic imaging suffers from diffraction limit due to the loss of evanescent field that carries subwavelength information. Most of the current methods for overcoming the diffraction limit in acoustics still operate in the near-field of the object. Here we demonstrate the design and experimental realization of an acoustic far-field subwavelength imaging system. Our system is based on wave vector filtering and conversion with a transmitter at the near-field and a spatially symmetrical receiver at the far-field. By tuning geometric parameters of the transmitting/receiving pair, different spatial frequency bands can be separated and projected to the far-field. Furthermore, far-field imaging and edge detection of subwavelength objects are experimentally demonstrated. The proposed system brings new possibilities for far-field subwavelength wave manipulation, which can be further applied to medical imaging, nondestructive testing, and acoustic communication.
At CES 2019, imec, a Belgian organization, and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, presented their latest vitals monitoring patch. The disposable device has a monitoring lifetime of over a week, but since the battery is made of non-toxic materials there’s not a big environmental impact.
The device has a basic ECG built-in, can measure blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), a newly introduced feature, physical activity thanks to an accelerometer, and it also sports a bioelectrical impedance monitor.
A move by Chattanooga FC could foreshadow a change to the landscape of American sports organization ownership.
Chattanooga FC, a team in the National Premier Soccer League in Tennessee, launched a crowd-funding campaign on WeFunder last week, becoming the first American franchise to offer public ownership shares.
The team’s founding owners had thought about the idea of public ownership since following its second season in 2010, but was only made possible with the passage of the Jobs Act in late 2016 which allowed for crowdfunding in corporations by non-accredited investors.
The team was started by a group of guys who shared a passion of Chattanooga and now they want to attach the team to the community for years to come, said Tim Kelly, one of the founders and current chairman of the board.
As bullpens swell and benches shrink, teams are looking for more productive players who moonlight at many positions—not just by necessity, but by design
… Gamblers want more transparency when it comes to injuries. Players, like anyone else, have privacy rights. Teams don’t want to allow a competitive disadvantage — and want to limit possible damage to business — and frequently obfuscate. In short, it’s a challenge.
Determining injury recovery time is an inexact science, even for the best doctors. Every ankle is different, every injury is different. The Lakers, for example, just had to deal with the blow of Lonzo Ball suffering a Grade 3 ankle sprain and projected he’d be out four to six weeks. Last season, the Detroit Pistons lost Reggie Jackson to a Grade 3 ankle sprain and he missed 12 weeks (they’d projected eight weeks at the time of injury).