From Sam Kean in 3 quarks daily:
Head injuries have dogged the National Football League since its very early days, since even before facemasks. But, donning the proud mantle of tobacco scientists everywhere, the NFL’s experts refused to admit until just a few months ago that it wasn’t a coincidence so many former players ended up with neurological damage by the time they turned fifty. The word going around is that a few skeptical medical men in charge of the NFL’s official investigation into the matter, a team led by one Dr. Ira Casson, had been dismissing the link between concussions and cognitive difficulties. Casson seemed obviously full of crap, and after Congress hog-piled onto the issue to scold the league, the NFL finally dismissed Casson and reevaluated the evidence. It was damning. In one study, coroners discovered that twelve of thirteen former NFL players had a buildup of a plaque in their brains—a plaque—called tau, a snarl of protein that disrupts neuronal function and that has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Many of the NFL players died in their forties; another autopsy revealed the beginning of tau tangles in an 18-year-old.
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Unfair advantage? Because they produce less force with each step, lightweight sprinting prostheses probably don't give amputee athletes a leg up. Credit: Orthopedic Specialty Hospital
From Michael Torrice in ScienceNOW Daily News.
In 2007, South African double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius became the first disabled athlete to compete against able-bodied runners, placing seventh in the British Grand Prix. But his J-shaped carbon-fiber prostheses, called the Össur Flex-Foot Cheetah, sparked a debate within the athletic world: Do the devices give him an unfair advantage over able-bodied competitors? The answer, according to a new study of six amputee sprinters, is no.
Scientists debate whether the Össur Cheetah boosts performance. Some experts believed that Pistorius’s setup would allow him and other amputee sprinters to move their legs faster than able-bodied runners and reach high speeds more easily. But last summer, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge showed that Pistorius’s prosthetic limbs didn’t generate as much force against the ground as biological legs.
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Christopher Green of York University and Ludy Benjamin of Texas A&M University are editors of Psychology Gets in the Game: Sport, Mind, and Behavior, 1880-1960, a new book from the University of Nebraska Press.
Although sport psychology did not fully mature as a recognized discipline until the 1960s, pioneering psychologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making greater use of empirical research methodologies, sought to understand mental factors that affect athletic performance. Though the psychologists behind the studies described here worked independently of one another and charted their own distinct courses of inquiry, their works, taken together, provided the corpus of precedents and foundations on which the modern field of sport psychology was built. The essays collected in this volume tell the stories not only of these psychologists and their subjects but of the social and academic context that surrounded them, shaping and being shaped by their ideas.
