Christian Pulisic isn’t just the best male soccer player the country has ever produced—he’s also one of the best in the world. With more homegrown talent following in his footsteps, is he ready to be the leading man that U.S. soccer has been waiting for?
… United States youth international right-back [Joe] Scally signed for Borussia Monchengladbach from New York City FC more than a year ago, in December 2019, but he had to wait until this month to join them following his 18th birthday on New Year’s Eve. On Jan. 3, he waited until the last possible moment to wave goodbye to his family and girlfriend at the departure gates of John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens and flew to Monchengladbach to complete the move that had been a year in the making.
Scally had never lived away from home before — he discovered early on that he could master eggs for breakfast, but struggled to put together lunch and dinner. His current specialty is sausage and pasta, cooked in an air fryer. “I throw in some sauce as well,” he told ESPN.
For now, Scally is living on the Borussia Monchengladbach campus, which houses their stadium and training ground. They have four apartments in the on-site hotel for new players; from there, the club’s player liaison officers will help them find permanent accommodation. Scally plans to live alone, but find somewhere in the city center big enough to welcome his family and partner once COVID-19 lockdown regulations are eased.
Far from deterred by a lengthy layoff after getting her left knee scoped, Carli Lloyd is back with a steadfast resolve as the United States pushes toward the Tokyo Olympics.
Lloyd’s recovery work was on display Monday night in Florida when she played the full 90 minutes in the team’s 4-0 victory over Colombia.
Not bad for a veteran player who is 38 and hadn’t played since last March.
“I’m pretty happy with where I’m at physically, after an injury,” she said. “You know, having somewhat of a minor scope, I guess as people say, isn’t really minor. So it took me a ways to get back and rebuild myself again.”
An unprecedented decision by the NCAA that means college basketball players won’t be charged one of their four years of eligibility while playing during a pandemic has brought on a very unique situation where in a two-week span Kendall Coley could go from being a high school student in Minneapolis to playing in a college women’s game for Nebraska.
Nebraska’s top recruit in the senior class arrived in Lincoln four months earlier than expected and could be playing for the Huskers in six days. The top-50 national prospect graduated from high school last week and is in the process of joining the team, coach Amy Williams announced Tuesday.
Coley arrived in Lincoln on Sunday and has been going through COVID-19 protocols and testing. She was on the bench during Nebraska’s game against Minnesota on Tuesday but wasn’t available to play. However, if Coley clears the normal health tests required for all new athletes, she could practice later this week and perhaps be able to play against Illinois next Monday.
Anthony Schlegel is reuniting with Urban Meyer in Jacksonville.
Schlegel, a former Ohio State linebacker who later worked for Meyer and the Buckeyes as an assistant strength and conditioning coach, is joining Meyer’s new staff in Jacksonville as the Jaguars’ head strength and conditioning coach, he confirmed during 97.1 The Fan’s Morning Juice on Monday.
“You have the opportunity to work for someone you believe in and trust and understand their culture and what they want in an organization with Coach Meyer,” Schlegel said. “All gas, no brakes, let’s go.”
A physiology journal has retracted a pair of papers from a group in Australia after learning that the flawed work was the subject of an institutional investigation.
The articles, both of which were published last year in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, came from a group at the Murdoch Applied Sports Science Laboratory, part of Murdoch University. The first author on both papers was Liam J. Hughes, a PhD student at Murdoch who was terminated as a result of the misconduct.
Fitness tech at CES 2021 reflected the reality we are all living in: Staying at home and looking for ways to keep fit. In addition to smart watches and earbuds, companies offered virtual trainers and even a fitness wall that will measure how hard users hit it. The wall from Ark Sports also comes with software that personal trainers can use to build individual and group workouts.
That fitness device requires a dedicated fitness room (it’s almost 40 feet long and 5 feet tall) but the smart yoga mat from YogiFi and brain-training system Reflexion will work for apartment dwellers.
All these options represent the size of the online fitness market, which is predicted to cross $30 billion by 2026, according to Global Market Insights. Here’s a look at the most interesting fitness tech from CES 2021.
Point-of-care COVID-19 assays that are more sensitive than the current RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) gold standard assay are needed to improve disease control efforts. We describe the development of a portable, ultrasensitive saliva-based COVID-19 assay with a 15-min sample-to-answer time that does not require RNA isolation or laboratory equipment. This assay uses CRISPR-Cas12a activity to enhance viral amplicon signal, which is stimulated by the laser diode of a smartphone-based fluorescence microscope device. This device robustly quantified viral load over a broad linear range (1 to 105 copies/μl) and exhibited a limit of detection (0.38 copies/μl) below that of the RT-PCR reference assay. CRISPR-read SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) RNA levels were similar in patient saliva and nasal swabs, and viral loads measured by RT-PCR and the smartphone-read CRISPR assay demonstrated good correlation, supporting the potential use of this portable assay for saliva-based point-of-care COVID-19 diagnosis. [full text]
A Heidelberg, Germany, based lab specializing in printed and organic electronics has demonstrated a smart mattress cover which will help hospitals and care homes to continually monitor patients in real-time and reduce the risk of developing pressure ulcers.
According to InnovationLab, which provides research as well as custom hardware/software development and manufacturing infrastructure for printed electronics, with a particular focus on flexible pressure sensors, its smart mattress cover could reduce by up to 88% the risk of developing decubitus ulcers, the potentially life-threatening pressure ulcers that affect up to 2.5 million hospital patients in the U.S. annually. Combining InnovationLab’s flexible printed sensors with specialized health-monitoring software from Bitquadrat, the new platform conducts personalized, real-time risk-assessment of pressure ulcers—providing a very efficient way to inform nurses and other caregivers when patients require repositioning on their mattress.
University of Virginia, The Cavalier Daily student newspaper, Vignesh Mulay from
… Virginia Athletics’ Department of Sports Medicine aims “to provide the ‘Gold Standard’ of health care for Division 1 intercollegiate student-athletes.” The department strives to be a model for sports teams at every level. According to Kelli Pugh, associate athletics director for sports medicine, continuous learning and cross-functional collaboration are the keys to providing cutting-edge, high-quality care.
“The sports medicine staff improves our skills and furthers our knowledge through continuing education and participation in clinical research,” Pugh said in an email to The Cavalier Daily. “We work closely with our team physicians, strength coaches, sports dieticians, and sports psychologists to provide evidence based care to all student-athletes.”
The chief responsibilities of the sports medicine staff are injury prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. Like many Cavaliers, women’s soccer senior goalkeeper Laurel Ivory has seen the benefits of the service firsthand. Ivory highlighted that she appreciates her routine interactions with Virginia’s sports medicine professionals, including Associate Athletic Trainer Bill Parente and Siobhan Statuta, sports medicine primary care specialist.
“I am in frequent communication of aches and pains that I get in training or in competition with [Parente], and there is always a remedy,” Ivory said in an email to The Cavalier Daily. “Aside from him, I see the doctors on average around once a month or once every two months. If I need to be seen about anything major, illness-wise or injury, I will quickly stop in and see them to hear what they have to say about my situation.”
Steve Solomon, a 400-metre sprinter and co-captain of the Australian athletics team, has plenty to think about. The postponed 2020 Olympics are now just six months away and, barring a Covid-19 outbreak in Australia, Solomon will compete in the national championships in April before beginning final preparations for Tokyo. But there is one thing that the sprinter insists is not front of mind for him and his teammates: the coronavirus vaccine. “Everyone is just focused on making sure we are physically and mentally ready for the Games,” he said.
Solomon’s thoughts may be elsewhere, but plenty within the Olympic movement in Australia and overseas are pre-occupied with how the world’s biggest sporting event can take place safely in the midst of a pandemic. The Games are scheduled to begin on 23 July; the International Olympic Committee and the Japanese government insist it will go ahead, despite a recent spike in cases in Tokyo. If the Olympics are to proceed, the vaccine offers a potential solution.
“My preference would be to get vaccinated before I go to Japan, certainly,” Solomon said. “If I am not vaccinated by then, I will still go. That is a risk I am willing to take to represent my country. I firmly believe that the vaccine needs to be given first to those parts of the population that are most vulnerable to the coronavirus. Athletes are not part of that population.”
Harvard University, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, The Nutrition Source from
… While sticking to healthy habits is often easier said than done, we created this guide with the goal of providing some tips and strategies that may help. During these particularly uncertain times, we invite you to do what you can to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and hopefully (if you’re able to try out a new recipe or exercise, or pick up a fulfilling hobby) find some enjoyment along the way.
Making it onto the shortlist is often a crucial early step toward professional advancement. For under-represented candidates, one barrier to making the shortlist is the prevalence of informal recruitment practices (for example, colleague recommendations). The current research investigates informal shortlists generated in male-dominant domains (for example, technology executives) and tests a theory-driven intervention to increase the consideration of female candidates. Across ten studies (N = 5,741) we asked individuals to generate an informal shortlist of candidates for a male-dominant role and then asked them to extend the list. We consistently found more female candidates in the extended (versus initial) list. This longer shortlist effect occurs because continued response generation promotes divergence from the category prototype (for example, male technology executives). Studies 3 and 4 supported this mechanism, and study 5 tested the effect of shortlist length on selection decisions. This longer shortlist intervention is a low-cost and simple way to support gender equity efforts.
University of Southampton, Electronics and Computer Science from
Machine learning algorithms developed by computer scientists from the University of Southampton have pinpointed a transfer target that would most suit Southampton FC in the January transfer window.
The AI insight tips that England Under-21s’ Brandon Williams would be an excellent fit for the Saints and offer a long-term replacement to 31-year-old left-back Ryan Bertrand.
The analysis suggests that Williams’ playing style and chemistry with his prospective teammates are ideally suited to the Southampton FC, with the club being much better for his development than other reported loan options such as Newcastle United FC.