Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 21, 2019

… “You never envision scoring that many goals in the NHL, and hopefully a lot more to come,” Stamkos added. “But it’s a great honor and privilege to play in this league for a long time, and to do it with one organization is pretty special.”

At 29, Stamkos is in his 12th season and no longer the most dynamic scorer on a deep, talented roster featuring reigning league MVP and scoring champion Nikita Kucherov and rising star Brayden Point. He remains the face of the franchise, though, and entered Tuesday night’s game against defending Stanley Cup champion St. Louis Blues with a team-leading seven goals, along with 13 assists for 20 points.

… American scientist Robby Ketchell was woken by a nightmare at 3am. He was so unsettled that he jumped out of bed and hotfooted it 3km across Vienna.

Ketchell was desperate to check nobody was trespassing on a small roundabout that had been his second home for the past two weeks. For the next four hours until sunrise, he kept a one-man watch over this hump in the road – a pivotal piece in the complicated jigsaw of Kipchoge’s 1:59 Challenge.

Why? As a data scientist Ketchell has helped Team Ineos (formerly Team Sky) win three Tours de France. He is a man well schooled in sport’s one percent advantages – the so-called marginal gains.

… Player development has been a vital piece of the turnaround, as the Hoosiers have gone from having mediocre speed to boasting one of the fastest rosters in college football.

[Matt] Rhea, along with IU Director of Football Performance Dave Ballou, arrived in Bloomington in January of 2018. Over the course of the next year, Indiana players saw their top running speed increase by an average of over 3 miles per hour.

The gains have continued into 2019, as Rhea reports Indiana’s “team speed”—a single figure based off each starter’s average in-game speed—is more than a mile per hour faster this season than it was last year.

“Team speed is what wins football games,” says Rhea. “Those kind of improvements are a combination of the intense work ethic of our players and the fact Dave Ballou and I are willing to invest a ton of time into individualizing this as best we can for our players.”

Rating of perceived effort (RPE) scales are the most frequently used single-item scales in exercise science. They offer an easy and useful way to monitor and prescribe exercise intensity. However, RPE scales suffer from methodological limitations stemming from multiple perceived effort definitions and measurement strategies. In the present review, we attend these issues by covering (1) two popular perceived effort definitions, (2) the terms included within these definitions and the reasons they can impede validity, (3) the problems associated with using different effort scales and instructions, and (4) measuring perceived effort from specific body parts and the body as a whole. We pose that the large number of interactions between definitions, scales, instructions and applications strategies, threatens measurement validity of RPE. We suggest two strategies to overcome these limitations: (1) to reinforce consistency by narrowing the number of definitions of perceived effort, the number of terms included within them, and the number of scales and instructions used. (2) Rather than measuring solely RPE as commonly done, exercise sciences will benefit from incorporating other single-item scales that measure affect, fatigue and discomfort, among others. By following these two recommendations, we expect the field will increase measurement validity and become more comprehensive.

… I have never doubted that movement quality is a very real thing. To prove that it exists, you need only look at the flowing movement of an elite ballerina. But can this quality be described in a way that is objective, and generalizable outside of a specific technique?

A recent paper argues that “smoothness” may be an essential quality all good movements, and that this quality can be measured. Here’s a link to the paper by John Keily, Craig Pickering and David Collins called Smoothness: An Unexplored Window into Coordinated Running Proficiency. Following is a brief summary.

What exactly are living devices? They sound like they might come straight out of science fiction, but they are in fact being created at Tufts every day, from silk-based sensors attached to your teeth to monitor your diet to paper cards used to diagnose disease.

Now researchers at Tufts’ Laboratory for Living Devices (L²D) want to share the science behind their advances. They are hosting L²D Day, an interactive event that will be held on Thursday, November 7, from 2 to 4 p.m. in the atrium of the Science and Engineering Complex, 200 College Avenue, Medford.

The Tufts community is invited to hear faculty talk about their ongoing projects and meet L2D researchers who will demonstrate prototypes with applications in technology, medicine, diagnostics, and personalized health.

Imagine a handheld electronic gadget that can soften and deform when attached to our skin. This will be the future of electronics we all dreamed of. A research team at KAIST says their new platform called ‘Transformative Electronics Systems’ will open a new class of electronics, allowing reconfigurable electronic interfaces to be optimized for a variety of applications.

A team working under Professor Jae-Woong Jeong from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST has invented a multifunctional electronic platform that can mechanically transform its shape, flexibility, and stretchability. This platform, which was reported in Science Advances, allows users to seamlessly and precisely tune its stiffness and shape.

“This new class of electronics will not only offer robust, convenient interfaces for use in both tabletop or handheld setups, but also allow seamless integration with the skin when applied onto our bodies,” said Professor Jeong.

Bell is developing wearable-device technology it claims is superior to an Apple Watch or Fitbit, The Logic has learned.

The technology measures its wearer’s heart rate, temperature, speed and location, among other variables. The telecommunications giant is looking at rolling out a version for use by the general population, as well as features for diabetics and the elderly, and some that could be used to monitor parolees and prisoners.

Bell would be the first Canadian telecom to launch this kind of wearable technology.

“The point of difference between what Bell is proposing and what’s already out there in the market would be quite unique,” said Jonathan Peake, a senior lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology.

The popularity of wearable technology has risen enormously, with the US market projected to be in the tens of billions of dollars by 2022 (see go.nature.com/33tcein). However, the effectiveness of the most common wearable devices is hindered by the physical specifications of their components: although the device is often embedded in a flexible soft shell, the main parts, such as the sensors and electronics, are still rigid1,2. Now, writing in Science Advances, Polat et al.3 report a class of truly flexible, transparent wearable device that is based on graphene covered with a layer of semiconducting nanoparticles known as quantum dots. Impressively, the devices measure various vital signs using only ambient light as a signal.

… Antennas that receive and transmit radio waves are usually made of metal conductors, such as aluminum, copper and silver. Although these materials have high electrical conductivity, they do not perform well in ultrathin, lightweight antennas. As a result, most metal-based antennas are thicker than 30 micrometers in diameter, which limits their application in miniaturized electronic devices. To make even tinier antennas, Keun-Young Shin, Ho Seok Park and colleagues wanted to try using extremely thin sheets of a 2D material that consisted of a layer of metallic niobium atoms sandwiched between two layers of selenium atoms (NbSe2).

The researchers made their antenna by spray-coating several layers of NbSe2 nanosheets onto a plastic substrate. They then tested the 885 nm-thick antenna, finding that a 10 × 10 mm2 patch of the ultrathin material performed well, with a radiation efficiency of 70.6%. The device propagated radio frequency waves in all directions.

To seamlessly integrate electronics with the natural world, materials are needed that are both stretchable and degradable –– for example, flexible medical devices that conform to the surfaces of internal organs, but that dissolve and disappear when no longer needed. However, introducing these properties to electronics has been challenging. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed stretchable, degradable semiconductors that could someday find applications in health and environmental monitoring.

Luka Doncic’s offensive wizardry is well-known by now, but his ability to crash the boards like a big man has quietly been the key to the Mavericks’ resurgence this season—and a lesson for the rest of the league on how to fill out your lineup

… Francis, the organization’s second-ever hire, jokes that he grew employment by 50 per cent on Sept. 3, when he hired Ricky Olczyk as his first assistant GM. Seattle now has six pro scouts, including Hall of Fame American player Cammi Granato, who have begun to build out a scouting platform and take in games.

But operational staffing won’t ramp up until summer 2020 because Francis is trying to be respectful of ownership by not spending big on salary until necessary.

Come summertime, he’ll be staffing out a group of amateur scouts to prepare for the 2021 entry draft, more hockey operations personnel as well as a head of equipment and a head athletic trainer.

On a Friday morning in October, Alexandra Mandrycky, director of hockey strategy and research for the NHL expansion franchise in Seattle, posted a thread of tweets soliciting applications for three jobs in the hockey operations department, hoping for a few nibbles over the weekend. Instead, the interest was so overwhelming—the thread’s first message had 241 retweets and some 1,300 likes at last tally—that Mandrycky had to shut off her notifications.

“I was not,” she says, “expecting that to blow up.”

Then again, Mandrycky probably should have known better than to underestimate Seattle’s willingness to answer her call to arms. Or, more precisely, computers. Except for Silicon Valley, no region of the country boasts such a large pool of qualified candidates for the available positions: developer, data engineer and quantitative analyst. “Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia—all these companies here are tech giants,” Mandrycky says. “They certainly have a lot of employees. We hope some of them may be interested in working for a hockey team.”

… The Blades achieved promotion by taking high-quality shots from close range and restricting their opponents to speculative shots. They were slow, but engineered overloads and mismatches in open play (overlapping centre-backs, anyone?) and on set pieces. Something would have to give when transposing much of the same ageing squad to the Premier League, the assumption went, but what?

The Premier League version of Sheffield United have retained the focus on shot quality.