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Engineering The Ideal Olympian: The Games Of Risk.
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Engineering The Ideal Olympian: The Games Of Risk The 2010 Winter Olympics had the same overall injury rate as the Summer Olympics in 2012—for both, it was about 11 percent. But TorbjornSoligard, an officer at the medical and scientific department of the International Olympic Committee, says severe acute injuries (such as torn ligaments) are more common in the Winter Games because so many of the events involve high speeds. Once scientists target frequent injuries, new safety tools can help mitigate the risks.
Uzbekistan Will Test Kids' Genes To Find Future Olympians • To spot future Olympians, it's common practice to wait to see if youngsters are actually good at any given activity. But the central Asian country of Uzbekistan will begin testing the genes of kids as young as 10 to try and find future champion nation has been studying the genes of its top athletes for two years, and have picked out a set of 50 genes that they will search for in Uzbek kids' DNA starting early next year, "Developed countries throughout the world like the United States, China, and European countries are researching Experts are skeptical. It isn't known what most genes do, and even then, it's often unclear how multiple genes interact. As journalist David Epstein writes in his book the sports gene, if you want to see which kid is likely to be the fastest (in the present, as well as the near future), its best to line them up and have a race. • "Actually, it doesn't make much sense to do it at the genetic level at this point," Epstein told The Atlantic. "What they are trying to do is learn about someone's physiology. If you want to learn about someone's physiology, you should test their physiology instead of the genes." Uzbekistan's program is the first to test children to glean their future athletic prowess, he added. But there have been tests on adults, Epstein said: • "There was an Australian rugby team testing players for one gene called acnt3 that codes for a protein found only in fast-twitch muscle fibers—the kind for sprinting and jumping. If you don't have the so-called 'right version,' you're just not going to be in the Olympic 100-meter final. That's just a fact," he says. "So that has a little predictive power. But that only rules out one of 7 billion people on Earth. So it's an incredibly poor predictor."
Engineering The Ideal Olympian: Customized Wind Tunnel For Ski Jumpers
Many Promising Embryonic Stem Cell Therapies Ensnared In Legal Loophole.
