… With the Nets shorthanded this season with players like Kevin Durant and James Harden out for extended periods of time, 76ers’ Danny Green believes Brooklyn is doing what the San Antonio Spurs did when he played for the team – keeping things close to the vest.
“I know in San Antonio, some games we didn’t play everybody so that teams don’t know how to guard us, how to play us,” Green said during a recent 76ers media session.
The LA Galaxy today announced key additions to the club’s Sports Science and Performance Department. Led by Jim Liston, Director of High Performance and Innovation, the department will maximize performance, minimize injury risk, optimize fitness, nutrition levels and execute comprehensive training regiments for Major League Soccer’s premier club.
… It was PJ Fleck’s first year at the U. The promising young coach known for his boundless energy and charisma on the field. But it was what [Jason] Stahl says he noticed in class that worried him.
“Physical and mental health degradation. I saw it in the classroom,” Stahl said.
We’ve got a great lineup of stories coming up in our Neuro Athletics newsletter, handpicked just for you. This series focuses on sleep. Read on to learn how…
Jet lag disrupts sleeping patterns and leads to decreased performance
Neuroscience is the most promising area of scientific research in the pursuit of increasing human athletic performance
The Denver Broncos and tackle Ja’Wuan James have become the focal points in the growing acrimony between the NFL and the NFL Players Association over attendance of players at voluntary offseason workouts.
That relationship grew even more strained on Thursday when the players’ union fired back to its membership its response to a memo from the NFL’s management council to team executives and head coaches earlier this week.
In a wide-ranging email to players, which was read to ESPN, union officials devoted a section to the season-ending Achilles tendon injury James suffered earlier this week while working out away from the Broncos’ complex.
Last summer, while training together twice a day in preparation for their upcoming soccer seasons, Brown University students Alex Cooper-Hohn and Abby Carchio quickly realized that the most rigorous part of their training was not the actual workouts. It was the 30 to 45 minutes the two spent scouring YouTube and the internet beforehand to plan and create their routines.
Cooper-Hohn and Carchio discovered they were not alone — many players couldn’t afford a personal coach or the high expenses associated with joining a second team during the offseason. To even the playing field, the two launched Trainsolo, an app that helps aspiring and collegiate soccer players easily create the workouts and training sessions they need in order to stay fit over the offseason.
“The overarching mission is to optimize planning and execution of non-team training sessions, especially for players that can’t afford personal soccer coaches because the pay to play is huge in sport in America,” Cooper-Hohn, co-founder of Trainsolo, told Rhode Island Inno.
… Earlier this month, LAFC announced a partnership with Uplift Labs to trial the company’s newest technology, which allows coaches and trainers to view and analyze player movement in real-time using just iPhones and iPads.
The partnership also involved the Verizon 5G Labs, which has provided LAFC with hardware to enable the AI-powered analytics platform.
Using those devices, coaches can view 3D mockups and biometric data straight from their phones without the use of restrictive sensors.
Tissue-resident stem cells may enter a dormant state, also known as quiescence, which allows them to withstand metabolic stress and unfavorable conditions. Similarly, hibernating mammals can also enter a state of dormancy used to evade hostile circumstances, such as food shortage and low ambient temperatures. In hibernation, the dormant state of the individual and its cells is commonly known as torpor, and is characterized by metabolic suppression in individual cells. Given that both conditions represent cell survival strategies, we here compare the molecular aspects of cellular quiescence, particularly of well-studied hematopoietic stem cells, and torpor at the cellular level. Critical processes of dormancy are reviewed, including the suppression of the cell cycle, changes in metabolic characteristics, and cellular mechanisms of dealing with damage. Key factors shared by hematopoietic stem cell quiescence and torpor include a reversible activation of factors inhibiting the cell cycle, a shift in metabolism from glucose to fatty acid oxidation, downregulation of mitochondrial activity, key changes in hypoxia-inducible factor one alpha (HIF-1α), mTOR, reversible protein phosphorylation and autophagy, and increased radiation resistance. This similarity is remarkable in view of the difference in cell populations, as stem cell quiescence regards proliferating cells, while torpor mainly involves terminally differentiated cells. A future perspective is provided how to advance our understanding of the crucial pathways that allow stem cells and hibernating animals to engage in their ‘great slumbers.’
Google AI Blog, Nachiappan Valliappan and Kai Kohlhoff from
Eye movement has been studied widely across vision science, language, and usability since the 1970s. Beyond basic research, a better understanding of eye movement could be useful in a wide variety of applications, ranging across usability and user experience research, gaming, driving, and gaze-based interaction for accessibility to healthcare. However, progress has been limited because most prior research has focused on specialized hardware-based eye trackers that are expensive and do not easily scale.
In “Accelerating eye movement research via accurate and affordable smartphone eye tracking”, published in Nature Communications, and “Digital biomarker of mental fatigue”, published in npj Digital Medicine, we present accurate, smartphone-based, ML-powered eye tracking that has the potential to unlock new research into applications across the fields of vision, accessibility, healthcare, and wellness, while additionally providing orders-of-magnitude scaling across diverse populations in the world, all using the front-facing camera on a smartphone. We also discuss the potential use of this technology as a digital biomarker of mental fatigue, which can be useful for improved wellness.
One NFL source and one team source said this week that the Eagles researched the return-to-sports rates for ACL tear victims, and, in particular, how effectively linemen who return to sports play. They crunched the numbers and decided the gamble on Dickerson was a no-brainer. In fact, they’re sure that Dickerson could help the team before November.
Most studies indicate that players require a full year to return to play, though Eagles general manager Howie Roseman said last week, “We’re confident it’s not going to be a redshirt season.”
On August 21, 2020, the University of Iowa announced that it was eliminating the men’s and women’s swimming and diving, men’s gymnastics and men’s tennis teams. And those suddenly homeless Hawkeyes were not alone. From Stanford University to Appalachian State, schools have cut more than 300 teams from athletic programs throughout the United States since the fall of 2019.
Although the largest number of cuts took place at the NCAA Division I level, cuts were felt at community and junior colleges, NAIA schools, and all levels of the NCAA. They are largely in reaction to the harsh reality that American universities face more than $120 billion in negative financial impact from the COVID-19 pandemic.
When female athletes lose their opportunities, there is often an uproar — as there was in response to Iowa’s actions — and the issue of whether cutting teams is contrary to Title IX is an important one that will be felt for years to come in college athletics as the impacts of the pandemic continue.
… In October 2020, Major League Baseball announced they would trim the number of Minor League Baseball teams from 162 to 120 by the start of the 2021 season. And it was hard for me to decide if I had legitimate complaints about Minor League Baseball’s massive restructuring last winter, or if nostalgia for those Lookouts games and my current [Brooklyn] Cyclones fandom was getting in my way.
The reasons MLB gave for the 25 percent reduction in teams included better working conditions for players, including higher pay and improvements to facilities, transportation and accommodations, and more attention to geography, creating leagues with less travel time between clubs as well as consolidating affiliates into closer proximity to their major league club.
The Cyclones stadium is only 20-years-old, but many minor league stadiums are much older. Keith Raad, the Cyclones’ broadcaster and an account executive, says that in his time with the Cyclones, he has seen some substandard facilities, including one Northeastern stadium where the visiting Cyclones ate dinner in the bathroom. That city, he said, lost its team in the restructuring and he feels bad for the management and for the city.
Nikola Jokic may be the MVP, but is he a good defender? The truth is, the numbers don’t really know. The analytics revolution has changed basketball, but everyone—armchair statheads, team quants, agents, general managers—still can’t quite figure out how to properly measure the defensive side of the ball.