science Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Merril Hoge Doesn't Want You To Use Your Brain
To clear up any confusion, let’s get this out of the way: Merril Hoge and Peter Cummings, who co-authored a book called Brainwashed: The Bad Science Behind CTE and The Plot to Destroy Football, are not CTE deniers. They do not dismiss the scientific notion that repetitive brain trauma is a high-ris...
Indians Pitchers Ponder The Existence Of Multiple Earths
Carlos Carrasco carried the Cleveland Indians to a 6-2 win over the Brewers this afternoon. But all the fun for the AL Central division leaders didn’t seem to come until after the game, as shown by a Twitter poll put out into the world by Cleveland pitcher Brady Aiken....
Aubrey Huff <i>Almost</i> Has Thoughts On Evolution
“Look at the dumb thing this idiot tweeted” feels like a very circa-2013 blogging approach, but there are times to make exceptions. So look at the dumb thing Aubrey Huff tweeted:...
The Next Big Thing In Cycling Could Be Poop Doping
Read one particular way, the history of cycling is a history of riders doing all they can to stretch past the natural limits of the human body. Cheating has been at the very heart of cycling since its inception and riders have tried, at various points throughout the sport’s history, strychnine, EPO,...
Why Is This Wearable-Tech Company Helping College Teams Track How Often Athletes Sleep, Drink, And Have Sex?
Sometime between putting on his Halloween outfit—a cowboy ensemble, complete with the requisite hat, plaid shirt, cutoff jean shorts, and expensive leather boots borrowed from his Texan roommate—and this exact moment on the college-dorm dance floor, with the becostumed masses sweating to Fetty Wap, ...
How Craig Breslow Used Science To Engineer His Way Back Into Baseball
Craig Breslow is a little surprised that the media has made such a big deal out of his offseason reinvention. After a decade of pitching effectively in the major leagues, 2016 saw him demoted to the minors in May and released by two different teams before the season’s end. The way he looked at it, i...
Hog Watch: News About Hogs
Many people eat bacon but few regularly peruse the news for news about hogs. Until now. ...
Stem Cell Treatments Could Be The Next Frontier In Fixing Broken Pitchers
In an interesting dispatch from spring training, Yahoo’s Jeff Passan reports on Los Angeles Angels pitcher Garrett Richards’s recovery from a May 2016 elbow injury that shut him down for the season....
Science: CEOs Are Such Bullshit
“CEO” is a term for someone who is paid more money than you because they are able to project a large degree of confidence about their wrong ideas. Don’t take my word for it—it’s science!...
Man Creates 80-Foot-Long Whip Apparently Good Only For Hurting Himself
Via Reddit, here is a comically long bullwhip. But thanks to physics, the whipper necessarily becomes the whippee....
Science! Shows That Roger Federer's Backhand In Fact Defeated Rafael Nadal
Yesterday we argued that Federer’s unusually strong backhand anchored his Australian Open win over Rafael Nadal, and today we found a startling statistical basis for that claim. It comes courtesy of the always helpful Jeff Sackmann at TennisAbstract. Relative to other sports, tennis remains fairly d...
Animal Watch: Have Animals Escaped Our Control?
You can scarcely turn on the news these days without being confronted by the troubling question: What are animals doing now? ...
These Mammals Are Just Straight-Up Murdering Each Other All The Time
One of the more disturbing nature documentaries I’ve ever seen shows a dozen chimpanzees punching, kicking, biting a member of their own troop, chasing him up a tree and leaving him there to slowly die of his wounds over a span of three painful days....
National Parks, Ranked
This is a barren time in the sports calendar. We are in a desolate trough between the international intrigue of the Olympics and the drama and nonsense of football season. I’m goddamn bored. Coincidentally, the National Parks Service turns 100 years old today. Unlike late August, the National Parks ...
Counterpoint: Dying Is (Probably) Okay
My smart colleague George Dvorsky over at Gizmodo published a defense of “radical life extension” this morning. This is a largely pseudo- or quasi-scientific pursuit favored by billionaire parasite Peter Thiel (among others), based upon the idea that, essentially, death is a pathology rather than a ...
Go Ahead And Keep Not Flossing, Dirty Scoundrels
Is there anyone more reliably smug than a person who actually flosses the recommended amount? Somehow, routinely dredging up unidentifiable morsels of past meals from between their teeth gives people a sense of self-righteousness that they feel find about lording over the rest of us more casual, shi...
Just How Bullshit Are AccuWeather's Long-Range Forecasts? (Very)
When AccuWeather announced they would begin issuing 90-day forecasts in April, science writers, and the meteorologists they interviewed, were notably dubious. Sort of like how they were when AccuWeather debuted a 45-day forecast in 2013....
Watch A Man Hit A Frozen Dildo With A Baseball Bat
Wired’s Brent Rose dipped a few objects, including a big dildo, in liquid nitrogen and destroyed them. He also explained the science behind why some of the items broke, and why others didn’t. It’s a worthwhile use of your time....
Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 Hour" Rule Is Essentially Meaningless
In his 2008 book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell culled a memorable and marketable tip from a 1993 study of violinists at a music academy in Berlin. The study’s authors, he said, found that the most talented and accomplished 20-year-old violinists at the school had practiced an ave...
Is It Normal For Me To Hiccup So Damn Much?
Hiccups are, by nature, pretty normal. Everyone gets them and the only really worrisome side effect is the possibility that they won’t automatically dissipate in a timely fashion. If they don’t? Even hiccups that last for months or years or record-setting decades typically don’t keep the inflicted f...