Sports

Baseball diamonds are a left-hander’s best friend.
That’s because the game was designed to make a lefty the "Natural," according to David A. Peters, Ph.D., the McDonnell Douglas Professor of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis and uber baseball fan. Peters is a mechanical engineer who specializes in aircraft and helicopter engineering and has a [...]

A world-renowned team of experts in biomechanics and physiology from six universities, led by Professor Hugh Herr of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, refutes scientific claims that the prostheses worn by Oscar Pistorius, a 21-year-old South African bilateral amputee track athlete, provide him with an unfair advantage in the 400-meter race. Their conclusions [...]

How many games does it take to ensure that the best team in a sports league ends up with the best record? According to a study by a pair of physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the answer is an astounding 256 games per team in the case of baseball’s National [...]

The promise of watching the football World Cup with 21st century technology hints at a world where all media are tied together in a complete package that can excite, inform and entertain modern audiences using interactive technologies. We’re not there yet. But we’re getting there with the help of cutting-edge research.
Thanks to an ambitious and [...]

It’s quite trendy to use a Weblog as a bully pulpit to complain about something or other, and every so often I can’t resist the siren song myself. It’s hard not to be upset, though, when watching the 2006 Winter Olympics coverage on NBC TV, however, with its endless commercials, insipid background vignettes, and idiotic [...]

Scientists are trying to use nanotechnology to cure diseases, ameliorate the energy crisis and reduce golf scores.
Buffalo, N.Y.-based NanoDynamics has come up with a golf ball that can correct its own flight path so it flies straighter than conventional balls. The ball won’t shift 45 degrees in midair, but the design of the ball–and the [...]