If gravity can’t hold Simone Biles down, good luck to the International Gymnastics Federation.
Biles brought back her double twisting, double somersault dismount on balance beam for the first time in almost two years at the Olympic trials Friday night. That’s the skill so ridiculously difficult no other woman even tries it. But the FIG, in its infinite wisdom, refuses to give it accurate credit because it doesn’t want to give other, less capable gymnasts any ideas.
“I can do it, and it’s still an upgrade and it’s safe,” Biles told USA TODAY Sports in April. “It doesn’t add too much start value to my routine, but I’m capable of doing it. And I think people come to see those skills.”
CC Sabathia remembers the night he hit rock bottom.
The former New York Yankees pitcher had just been drenched in champagne days earlier after leading the team to a playoff berth in his final start of 2015.
Then, during New York’s final regular-season series against the Baltimore Orioles, 22 years of binge drinking culminated in a life-changing moment.
“It was being in a hotel room in Baltimore, not being able to stop drinking,” Sabathia told Insider. “Literally telling myself, ‘I can’t have another drink,’ and still going back to my mini-bar and pouring more Hennessy.”
… “Nikola never likes to sit. I think this year, him playing all 72 games played a small part in him winning MVP. I still think if he had missed 5 games, he still should have won MVP,” Coach Michael Malone said.
As impressive as Jokic’s availability was, it ended up being detrimental to the Nuggets in the postseason. By the second round, Jokic’s fatigue was evident and without a supporting cast to shoulder the load, the Nuggets were swept by the Suns.
“That’s a discussion we’ll continue to have. How can we help him so at the end of the season, we get out of the first round and he’s not completely shot,” Malone said.
In his end-of-the-year news conference, Malone said one thought is to schedule a few nights off before the start of the season instead of trying to do it while the season is in progress.
… Virginia Jarmond had encouraged her son to take the UCLA job, telling him it was his next challenge. He agreed after becoming captivated during his interview with school officials, learning about the many ways in which the nation’s most applied-to university and an athletic department with more NCAA titles than any other school besides Stanford were elite.
During the months that followed, that word kept circulating in his head. Elite. If the pandemic had one benefit, it was that it allowed Jarmond to meet with a larger swath of the athletic community more often, even if it was virtually. He hosted more than 150 online sessions dubbed “MJ Listens” to learn about what it meant to be a Bruin.
The word became a mantra in all caps, ELITE standing for energy, leadership, integrity, toughness and excellence.
To stay away from Azeroth—which is to remain unsubscribed from Blizzard Entertainment’s enduring MMORPG, World of Warcraft—is no simple task. In fact, the gaming community has long (and only half-jokingly) referred to the orc- and elf-filled game as “World of Warcrack.”
As somebody who, over the last 14 years, has racked up over 600 days played, the pull of WoW’s constant new dungeons, raids, and battlegrounds is something I can attest to. When I’m at a loose end, the first thing that comes to mind is logging on my level 60 rogue. And if I don’t play for an extended period of time, I’ll, quite literally, see WoW in my dreams. On a conscious and subconscious level, I can’t quite escape.
Video game “addiction,” though, isn’t solely relegated to WoW; it’s cross-genre and cross-platform. Neither is addiction the only neurological and psychological side effect of video games. So how, scientifically, do video games—from MMORPGs to shooters to RPGs—affect our brains? And despite the drawbacks, can the brain benefit from video games?
Overtraining syndrome is an important and often under-recognized problem in athletes. It can start in youth sports and progress up to the highest level of competition.
A school year unlike any other is coming to a close, but one thing remains the same: We’re still tussling, in the same old ways, over how math should be taught. More data science, less stuffy trigonometry? Students placed in separate classrooms by test scores or doing differentiated work in the same classroom? These questions are vexed, but I’ve got one suggestion for how we can improve. We can tell students that math is very, very hard.
It’s the truth. The techniques of algebra, geometry and calculus were hard to create, and they’re hard to learn. But saying so forthrightly doesn’t come naturally to a lot of teachers — or to commenters on education. “Math Is Not Hard: A Simple Method That Is Changing The World,” reads a headline in HuffPost, extolling an approach that aims to help ease kids into the subject. I embraced rhetoric like this when I was an apprentice college instructor. I was constantly telling students, at the outset of a computation, “Now this is pretty simple” — encouraging them, or so I thought. My mentor, the master teacher Robin Gottlieb, now a professor at Harvard, set me straight. When we say a lesson is “easy” or “simple,” and it manifestly isn’t, we are telling students that the difficulty isn’t with the mathematics, it’s with them. And they will believe us. They won’t think, “I’ve been lied to,” they’ll think, “I’m dumb and I should quit.”
This applies to parents, too. I’ve been teaching math for two decades, and I still find myself telling my kids that a math concept they’re struggling with is “not that hard.” That’s not encouragement — that’s evidence of my frustration with watching them struggle, and it’s not part of teaching.
Can a sensor be designed from the ground up, using only computer modeling and simulation?
The concept of computer-aided drug design is now more than 40 years old.(1) Many of the small-molecule drugs prescribed today were discovered using sophisticated computational approaches that predicted and then optimized properties such as binding affinity, absorption by targeted tissues, distribution in the body, metabolism, excretion, and lowered toxicity. In one respect, the challenge faced by those of us designing new sensors is similar to the challenge faced by designers of new therapeutics: the drug (in our case, the analyte) has to engage with its target receptor (the capture probe, the plasmonic metal surface, and the fluorophore, etc.) with high specificity. Additionally, just as a drug has to induce a higher order physiological response in the organism, an analyte has to induce a higher order physical response in the sensor—in the form of a shift in some resonant frequency, a change in impedance, a change in fluorescence, etc. So why are we not as adept at computer-aided sensor design as we are at computer-aided drug design?
I think there are many answers to this question, not the least of which is the larger amount of human effort and financing directed at drug development relative to sensor development.
Hamstring strain injuries are common among athletes and often require rehabilitation to prepare for timely return to sport performance, while also minimizing re-injury risk. Return to sport is typically achieved within weeks of the injury, but subsequent athlete performance may be impaired and re-injury rates are high. Improving these outcomes requires rehabilitation practitioners (e.g. Athletic Trainers and Physical Therapists) to understand the etiology and mechanisms of hamstring strain injury; know how to perform a thorough clinical examination; and progress loading to the site of injury in a safe and effective manner. This narrative review discusses current clinical concepts related to these aspects of hamstring strain injury rehabilitation, with the aim of helping practitioners improve athlete outcomes. Collectively, this knowledge will inform the implementation of evidence-based rehabilitation interventions.
CONTEXT: There is limited research concerning the relationship between social determinants of health, including race, healthcare access, socioeconomic status (SES), and physical environment; and, concussion nondisclosure in college-athletes. However, in high school athletes, disparities have been noted, with Black athletes attending under-resourced schools and lacking access to an athletic trainer (AT) disclosing fewer concussions.
OBJECTIVE: To investigate whether concussion nondisclosure disparities exist by 1) race, 2) SES, and 3) AT healthcare access prior to college; and to understand the differential reasons for concussion nondisclosure between Black and White college-athletes.
DESIGN: Cross-sectional Setting: College athletics Participants: 735 college-athletes (84.6% White, 15.4% Black) Main Outcome Measures: Participants completed a questionnaire that directly assessed concussion nondisclosure, including reasons for not reporting a suspected concussion. With the premise of investigating social determinants of health, race was the primary exposure of interest. The outcome of interest, nondisclosure, was assessed with a binary (yes/no) question, “Have you ever sustained a concussion that you did not report to your coach, athletic trainer, parent, teammate, or anyone else?”
RESULTS: Overall, among White and Black athletes 15.6% and 17.7% respectively reported a history of concussion nondisclosure. No significant differences were found by race for distributions of history of concussion nondisclosure (p=0.57). Race was not associated with concussion nondisclosure when evaluated as an effect modification measure or confounder; and, no significant associations were noted by SES or high school AT access. Differences by race for reported reasons for nondisclosure were found for: “At the time I did not think it was a concussion” (p=0.045) and “I thought my teammates would think I am weak” (p=0.03) with Black athletes reporting these more frequently than White athletes.
CONCLUSIONS: These data help to contextualize race and its intersection with other social determinants of health that could influence concussion nondisclosure outcomes in college-athletes.
BioMed Central Blogs, On Biology, Joseph Hasan from
The newest co-editor-in-chief of BMC’s Genes & Nutrition, Ahmed El-Sohemy is a Full Professor and Associate Chair at the University of Toronto. Professor El-Sohemy will be speaking at the Personalized Nutrition Innovation Summit on June 28th-29th, and in this new Q&A, Professor El-Sohemy discusses the summit, his company Nutrigenomix, and the journal.
… “At the end of the day, it’s the player’s body, they get paid a lot of money, and a lot of players know their own personal health, and you have to figure out how to manage that,” said [Justin] Zormelo. “It’s a collective effort between teams, players and support staff. I don’t think you can just blame it on the condensed season.”
Former Phoenix Suns director of player development Cody Toppert, now an assistant for the University of Memphis, describes a five-step holistic approach to the season. It begins with an accumulation phase focused on pushing past limits, followed by an intensification phase of higher intensity for shorter periods of time, a maintenance phase geared towards performance, recovery and injury prevention throughout a grueling season, the tapering phase of increased rest and lower volumes of high-intensity output ahead of the playoffs, and lastly the actualization phase of performing at the highest level of postseason intensity.
It is vital for teams to manage each player individually throughout. Max effort is not the same for everyone. Position and usage matter. What felt like a hard practice for one player can feel like a cakewalk to another. The workload Giannis Antetokounmpo carries in 30 game minutes is apples to Pat Connaughton’s oranges.
The important point of this paper is that studying and influencing collective behaviour has political, ethical and moral dimensions, and needs oversight just as much as e.g. biotech does. I aimed to suggest as much in Critical Mass.