… What was important was what being a member of his team’s first five symbolized: Thomas had worked his way back from a series of injuries, most noteworthy a serious hip problem that sidelined him during the playoffs in 2017 and led to surgery in March 2018.
Earlier that month is when he last started, in a game for the Los Angeles Lakers.
“There were dark days. I mean, it’s rehab. And for me to go through that for two years, it was tough. I’m not going to lie to you. And it did break me at times,” Thomas said. “But … it can’t storm forever. The sun has to come out at some point.”
… Some might argue that a lot of the statistical attacking improvements from Håland can simply be attributed to him being in a better team, surrounded by higher class teammates in a league that Salzburg is so dominant in. Those factors can’t be ignored but can also contribute towards someone developing into a better player themselves. However, with these individual offensive duels, it’s almost entirely down to Håland himself. What is so impressive is how he has suddenly become such a physical force in really big matches against top-quality opposition.
Stepping onto club football’s biggest stage – the UEFA Champions League – has been no issue. In the sequence below he manages to comprehensively win a duel with Kalidou Koulibaly. The Senegalese international has a market value of close to £70m and is considered one of the top defenders in the world. If Håland is doing this at just 19 years of age, then imagine what he can achieve as he grows even stronger in the future?
The Los Angeles Lakers look dominant on defense and, in the early going, LeBron James has been a linchpin rather than a liability on that end of the floor.
“I’m playing injury free. I’m not injured. My quick twitch is back. My speed is back, my strength is back,” James said after the Lakers’ 103-96 win over the San Antonio Spurs on Sunday.
… At 30 years old, the twins are two of the biggest stars for USA Hockey at a critical juncture for the sport. They are among the roughly 200 players boycotting professional hockey this year in support of a more sustainable league that pays players living wages.
Lamoureux-Morando and Lamoureux-Davidson emerged as leaders for the players in the 2017 contract dispute with USA Hockey. One of the things they fought for at the time was maternity benefits, which had never previously been given to female hockey players in the U.S.
“Our lawyers, specifically John Langel from Ballard Spahr who repped the women’s soccer team for 15 years, said, ‘Eventually you’re going to have moms on the team, and you’re going to need to protect them,'” Lamoureux-Davidson said. “We were the only ones married on the team at that time, and we both knew after Pyeongchang we wanted to start families. We wanted to continue to play, but we needed something to be in place so we could.”
… there are some around the league who aren’t fond of taking a more relaxed approach to the regular season. Count New York Knicks coach David Fizdale among them.
He’s thrown the No. 3 overall pick, R.J. Barrett, right into the fire. Through the team’s first seven games, Barrett is fifth in the league at 37.1 minutes per game, and on Sunday he played a whopping 41 minutes in a 21-point home loss to the Sacramento Kings. After the game, Fizdale was dismissive of the idea that this is too much, too soon for Barrett.
“He’s got the day off tomorrow,” Fizdale said. “We gotta get off this load management crap. Latrell Sprewell averaged 42 minutes for a season. This kid’s 19 years old. Drop it.”
… the current mood is helped by the head coach being surrounded by those with an intimate knowledge of the club rather than a foreign manager recruiting his own staff.
Former midfielder Jody Morris is Lampard’s assistant, and has coached Chelsea’s Under-18 side, which included current first-teamers Mason Mount and Callum Hudson-Odoi.
The coaching team is also made up of Joe Edwards, a former Under-23 coach, and former midfielder Eddie Newton, who helped Mount, Tammy Abraham and Fikayo Tomori while they were on loan before making their first-team breakthroughs this season.
Former Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech, – Lampard’s team-mate for 10 years – is now the club’s technical and performance adviser.
… Not a single player from England’s women’s world cup squad in 2019 was born in London, in fact, the majority of the squad were from the northern half of the country. An analysis of the English men’s team also showed the north-west being the most successful region for producing senior internationals. Differing developmental contexts and environmental and institutional processes can shape sporting landscapes and player production (Finnegan et al., 2017; Woolcock & Burke, 2013; Baker et al., 2009). MacDonald and colleagues (2009) suggest that “the birthplace effect is powerful and systematic and plays a significant role in sport expertise” (p. 236).
Should your wearable data be protected as health data? Can it be? The more the information gets integrated into your care plan, the more potential there is to improve your health, says Mona Sobhani, Director of Research and Operations at USC’s Center for Body Computing. But also the more potential for your privacy to be exposed. It doesn’t have to be that way. [video, 23:36]
Preprints.org; Reed D. Gurchiek, Nicholas Cheney, Ryan S. McGinnis from
Wearable sensors have the potential to enable comprehensive patient characterization and optimized clinical intervention. Critical to realizing this vision is accurate estimation of biomechanical time-series in daily-life, including joint, segment, and muscle kinetics and kinematics, from wearable sensor data. The use of physical models for estimation of these quantities often requires many wearable devices making practical implementation more difficult. However, regression techniques may provide a viable alternative by allowing the use of a reduced number of sensors for estimating biomechanical time-series. Herein, we review 46 articles that used regression algorithms to estimate joint, segment, and muscle kinematics and kinetics. We present a high-level comparison of the many different techniques identified and discuss the implications of our findings concerning practical implementation and further improving estimation accuracy. In particular, we found that several studies report the incorporation of domain knowledge often yielded superior performance. Further, most models were trained on small datasets in which case nonparametric regression often performed best. No models were open-sourced, and most were subject-specific and not validated on impaired populations. Future research should focus on developing open-source algorithms using complementary physics-based and machine learning techniques that are validated in clinically impaired populations. This approach may further improve estimation performance and reduce barriers to clinical adoption.
… Metacarpal fractures are not uncommon in basketball. They are often the result of impact, notably via accidental contact with another player or in a fall to the ground. In recent years, a number of highly visible players such as Russell Westbrook, Kevin Love, Rajon Rondo and Anthony Davis have suffered metacarpal fractures and have returned to play without limitation. Coincidentally, Baynes fractured his fourth metacarpal just last year while with the Boston Celtics after his hand accidentally struck the hand of the Suns’ Deandre Ayton. Baynes underwent surgery and missed approximately one month of game action.
As is the case with most injuries, there are numerous variations with these fractures in both location and complexity. The type that perhaps sports fans are most familiar with are the fractures of the shaft (long portion of the bone) of the metacarpal that either result in immobilization until the fracture heals or, more commonly of late, surgery with plates and screws to ensure proper alignment and reinforce the bone as it heals.
In healthy individuals, injured tissues rapidly repair themselves following damage. Within a healing skin wound, recruited inflammatory cells release a multitude of bacteriocidal factors, including reactive oxygen species (ROS), to eliminate invading pathogens. Paradoxically, while these highly reactive ROS confer resistance to infection, they are also toxic to host tissues and may ultimately delay repair. Repairing tissues have therefore evolved powerful cytoprotective “resilience” machinery to protect against and tolerate this collateral damage. Here, we use in vivo time-lapse imaging and genetic manipulation in Drosophila to dissect the molecular and cellular mechanisms that drive tissue resilience to wound-induced stress. We identify a dynamic, cross-regulatory network of stress-activated cytoprotective pathways, linking calcium, JNK, Nrf2, and Gadd45, that act to both “shield” tissues from oxidative damage and promote efficient damage repair. Ectopic activation of these pathways confers stress protection to naive tissue, while their inhibition leads to marked delays in wound closure. Strikingly, the induction of cytoprotection is tightly linked to the pathways that initiate the inflammatory response, suggesting evolution of a fail-safe mechanism for tissue protection each time inflammation is triggered. A better understanding of these resilience mechanisms—their identities and precise spatiotemporal regulation—is of major clinical importance for development of therapeutic interventions for all pathologies linked to oxidative stress, including debilitating chronic non-healing wounds. [full text]
POLITICO, Catherine Boudreau and Helena Bottemiller Evich from
Food is closely linked to health, yet federal nutrition research is underfunded, even as the costs of diet-related diseases are skyrocketing. Does Washington hold the key to solving the obesity crisis?
University of California-Santa Barbara, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) from
Eat less beef is a common refrain for those wanting to cut the climate impacts of their diets. While backed by research, this rule of thumb comes with a caveat – it is just one slice of the pie to consider when making food choices with the climate in mind.
The truth is, the scientific understanding about the whole pie is still unfolding. We don’t yet have a big picture view of the impacts of all of the major food systems on our climate – and vice versa – nor one that casts those impacts relative to others associated with food, such as land use and water pollution.
In fact, a recent paper by an NCEAS working group revealed the extent of “underassessed” foods, such as bush meat and aquaculture products, that are often missing from assessments, warning that if we continue to leave them out of our accounting, we cannot make smart food choices at both the policy and consumer levels.