science Page 8 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
This Man Is A Standup Comedian And An Evolutionary Anthropologist Studying The Science Of Funny. Ask Him About Jokes.
What do your jokes say about you? That's what Robert Lynch wants to know. He's pursuing his Ph.D. in evolutionary anthropology at Rutgers, and his studies focus on why humans laugh. (He's also a standup comedian.) Lynch is in the discussion below, ready to answer all your questions about the science...
Usain Bolt Outruns Human Nature
Usain Bolt, as winner of the 100 meter dash, receives the title "the world's fastest man." It carries a mystique unlike any other. Nobody cares about the world's best hammer thrower, or the world's best trampoliner. But running is different. Running speaks to something essential—no tools or equipmen...
Science! Says The 2008 Squad Was Actually The Best Olympic Basketball Team Of All Time
Paul Bessire, creator of the Predictalator, ran every men's hoops team from 1992 through 2012 through his machine, simulating each roster playing 50,000 games against every other edition. And to everyone's surprise, neither the '92 Dream Team nor the current squad in London came out on top. Winning ...
How Those Cheerleader-Eating Mascots Are Helping Kids With Their Autism
Those weird, inflatable mascots that seem to have an insatiable appetite for cheerleaders? Well, their creator is using them to not only entertain us sports-goers but also to assist kids with autism, using the suits to help them work on their social interactions. In a story in this month's Wired, ...
Throwing A Baseball At 90 Percent Speed Of Light Would Kill Thousands
The artistically inclined folks over at XKCD (authors of one of my favorite web comics ever) devoted one of their What If? segments today to the logically insane yet weirdly interesting scenario of what would happen if someone pitched a baseball at 90 percent the speed of light. Using actual science...
Ugandan Track Athletes Fail To Qualify For Olympics After National Stadium Taken Over By Japanese Religious Group
The Ugandan Athletic Federation says at least five athletes missed out on qualifying for the Olympics after discovering Japanese religious group Happy Science was using the national stadium in Kampala....
Fewer Threes, More Post: How LeBron James Completely Overhauled His Playoff Game
Unlike last year, LeBron James dominated the 2012 playoffs like the best basketball player in the world. We asked Kirk Goldsberry, of the indispensable CourtVision, what was different about James's postseason play this time around. ...
Can Science See Inside An NFL Player's Skull Before It's Too Late?
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is a diagnosis for dead people. Last month, Junior Seau was found in his home in Oceanside, Calif., with a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. A familiar sequence unfolded: His brain was requested by both the Brain Injury Research Institute and ...
Why Do Players Choke? Oddly Enough, Because They Hate Losing.
The New Yorker poached science writer Jonah Lehrer from Wired, and what do you know? His second piece is sports, and it is timely. Lehrer seeks to explain the plague of every duffer and NBA superstar since the beginning of time: Why do we choke? Why do we freeze up under pressure? Why do things that...
What Compression Gear Will And Won't (Mostly Won't) Do For You
What if pants could make me a better runner? With a half-marathon ahead of me, I decided it was time to try compression tights for training. As I struggled to pull a pair onto my slightly overweight legs, I could feel the skintight fabric transforming them from slack to firm, without any flexing. I ...
NFL Hall Of Famer Eric Dickerson Has A "Magic" Belt He'd Like To Sell You
When it comes to expensive pseudoscience, nothing beats magnets these days. Those Phiten necklaces that exploded in baseball a couple of years back have always been scant on hard science, and the makers behind PowerBalance basically admitted that their products were one big scam. But few of these cr...
How Readable Are Bill Simmons, Jason Whitlock, Rick Reilly, And Other Sportswriters? Science Investigates
The last time we played around with sportswriter analytics, we wondered if we could algorithmically determine a column's author based on his favorite words. (We could!) For a followup, I decided to look at the readability of different writers. Reading level is a nebulous concept and hard to define p...
NFL Moneyball: The Math Says To Draft Players With Criminal Records
It's our old friend Science, back to drop some NFL draft knowledge on us. Today's lesson: if you're looking to maximize the value of your draft position, you might be better off going with the guys with character issues. And in this case, "character issues" isn't code for asshole, it's code for guy ...
Soccer Is Not Like Sex
I'm going to let you in on one of the secrets of the internet: people like clicking on things about sex. Like, maybe you wandered over to the Fox Sports home page today, and you saw the headline "Score! European study says soccer like sex for fans." You probably clicked on it! I know I did....
Science: Sun And Wind Probably Did Not Cause Bobby Petrino's Motorcycle Crash
There are only two people who know what caused Bobby Petrino's cherry red Harley-Davidson Road King to skid off the highway earlier this month: Bobby Petrino and Jessica Dorrell. In the police report, Dorrell told officers "she did not know what caused this accident." Petrino's statement indicated t...
Peyton Manning Will Throw For 4,400 Yards, 32 Touchdowns Next Season, Says Science
Fantasy whiz Nik Bonaddio, proprietor of sports analytics firm numberFire, has weighed in with the first realistic prognostication of what fantasy players might expect from Manning, provided his surgically fused neck can hold up to the rigors of a full 16-game NFL season....
Nike Masters Science Behind Human Cloning, Wastes It On Brazilian Soccer Players
On the one hand, it's nice to see that Nike's Phil Knight, the 47th richest person in the world, has finally found an interesting way to spend his insane amount of cash. But if you were going to clone any group of people, would Brazilian soccer players really be near the top of the list? I can onl...
495 Degrees Per Second: How Olympic Snowboarding Gold Medalist Kelly Clark Hucks Herself
Kelly Clark is the two-time defending X Games Gold Medalist in Women's Superpipe. She won gold in Salt Lake in '02 and bronze in Vancouver in 2010. At the 2011 X Games she became the first woman to land a 1080 in competition. The 30th U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships are going on right now, and ...
Does The Success Of An NFL Replay Challenge Depend On Which TV Network Is Broadcasting The Game?
NBC's 40 cameras should give officials an unprecedented number of angles to analyze in the occasion a replay challenge is issued during Sunday's Super Bowl. While it makes sense that the biggest game of the season would have more replay resources, there are also differences in the video coverage of...
The L.A. Kings' Explanation For Last Night's Clock Discrepancy Is Bullshit. Here's Why.
The Los Angeles Kings' explanation (via GM Dean Lombardi) for last night's clock disaster that gave them a win over Columbus is ludicrous for two reasons. The first, and again quoting Lombardi in the Los Angeles Times:...