Ted Williams—two-time American League MVP, six-time league leader in batting, two-time winner of the Triple Crown, and the last player in MLB to bat over .400 in a single season—is thought to have had the best eyes in baseball. Despite getting hit in his right eye by a walnut as a boy, he had 20/10 vision—meaning if something was 20 feet away, he could see it as well as a “normal” person could from 10 feet. Williams denies the rumors that he could count the seams on an incoming fastball and watch it hit the bat—but says that “in the last 20 feet [he] could see which way it was spinning.”
Good vision is essential for athletes—and not just those trying to hit 90 mph fastballs with a stick. After Tiger Woods got LASIK surgery to improve his vision to 20/15, he reported that “the hole [looked] bigger and his ability to read greens improved dramatically.” He then went on to win the first first five tour events he played after having the surgery.
But visual acuity isn’t just about sharpness. It’s also about perceiving depth, color differences (although that doesn’t always help), reaction time, and field of view. In many cases, these qualities are more about the brain than the eyeball—and can potentially be improved with training, e.g., in the vein of brain games. Indeed, Williams himself noted that, “a lot of people have 20/10 vision. The reason I saw things was that I was so intense. It was discipline, not super eyesight.”
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At 25-years old, Pierre the penguin was starting to see his glory days as the California Academy of Sciences alpha male fade away. 25 years is a lot to ask for a species that usually only makes it to 20, and the elderly penguin had a rather awkward problem: His waterproof feathers were falling off, leaving him bald (with an “embarrassingly exposed, pale pink behind”). But the main problem wasn’t aesthetics—not that the comb-over is really an option for him—it’s that the penguin paddock is freaking cold. Heat lamps didn’t work, and the poor little guy “was unwilling to plunge into the academy’s penguin tank and ended up shivering on the sidelines while his 19 peers played in the water.”
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Given that the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field comes in pretty handy for pigeons, it’s worth asking: Can humans sense it too? Oleg Shumilov of Russia’s Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems set out to answer this question, as Catherine Brahic reports in the New Scientist. After examining the planet’s geomagnetic field activity from 1948 to 1997, he found that it peaked consistently three times a year: March through May, July, and October. A little cross-checking on the data revealed that those time periods coincided with the peaks in the number of suicides in Kirovsk, a city of around 30,000 people in the cold depths of northern Russia.
Thanks to the handy rule of correlation vs. causation, Shumilov’s discovery is a long way from providing definitive evidence that human sensitivity to magnetic field activity equals greater numbers of suicides at certain times.
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Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at a record-breaking rate—but it’s not all tumbling straight into the sea. A significant portion of Greenland’s meltwater—which forms on the surface during the summertime and can pool into lakes—finds its way straight through the ice sheet to the bedrock. There, it disperses and lubes up the ice-bedrock interface, substantially accelerating the flow of ice to the sea which, theoretically, causes the sea level to rise and exposes more ice to melting.
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According to a story by Ed Price, the Yankees beat reporter for the New Jersey Star Ledger, bottled water has been banned from the dugouts of Major League Baseball. Gatorade—not water—is the “official sports drink” of MLB, and cannot bear to share the dugout with any other form of hydration. Price’s article, which has been heavily blogged, says that players can’t be seen drinking anything but Gatorade—not even Aquafina, the “official water” of MLB. According to White Sox clubhouse personnel, if players take bottled water to the bench, all the bottled water will be removed from the clubhouse as punishment.
This seems like an pretty bad move on Gatorade’s part, as encroaching on an athlete’s right to freedom of hydration might create a bit of a backlash. And it turns out Gatorade actually isn’t that recklessly narcissistic—Price’s article is bogus.
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We’ve discussed how a mother’s diet may influence her baby’s sex. Now there’s research indicating that a baby’s diet may influence his or her future mental health and intelligence. Researchers for the Early Nutrition Programming Project (EARNEST) have found evidence that an infant’s diet can permanently affect the child’s future cognitive development, mental performance, and even susceptibility to mental illness.
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Keren Blankfeld Schultz at Scientific American has an interesting report on the effects of severe weather on the length of a single day, or the total time it takes Earth to rotate once on its axis. As it turns out, the speed of the planet’s rotation is determined by the amount of mass across its surface, which is made up of the “roiling aggregation of gases that comprise the atmosphere, the solid earth itself, its fluid core, and the sloshing ocean.”
So when an event that has the power to move a huge amount of mass—such as, say, an earthquake and/or tsunami—occurs, it can alter the earth’s rotation speed enough to lengthen or shorten a day by as much as several thousandths of a second.
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Eric Schwitzgebel, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Riverside, has written a paper, “Do Ethicists Steal More Books?” seeking to answer the timeless question of whether ethicists (i.e., people devoted to the study and philosophy of ethical codes) are concurrently more likely to hold themselves to higher standards of behavior (i.e., practice what they preach). His finding? Not so much.
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If harvesting cells from your placenta makes you queasy, and it’s too late to access some umbilical cord blood, there’s yet another medical waste product that may provide a new, uncontroversial source of stem cells: menstrual blood.
Dr. Amit Patel from the University of Pittsburgh found that the uterine lining, which is shed during menstruation, contains millions of stem cells. These cells are multipotent (can give rise to several different cell types) and have the capacity for self-renewal—two essential properties of stem cells. The study showed that menstrual stem cells (MenSCs) could differentiate into cells that give rise to fat, cartilage, bone, skin, muscle, heart, and brain cells (though it’s important to note that the MenSC’s did not actually differentiate into these cells—only into their predecessors). The cells actually showed greater potential capacity than bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells, as they had some of the same properties as human embryonic stem cells.
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A new study by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences found the first clear link between a mother’s diet and the sex of her baby. The research team took 740 first-time pregnant mothers in the U.K., none of whom knew their child’s sex, and had each mother record her diet before and directly after getting pregnant. Of the women who consumed the “highest energy intake”—which included the most calories and the widest range of nutrients including potassium, calcium, and vitamins C, E and B12—56 percent conceived sons, compared to 45 percent of the lowest intake group. One surprising note: A “strong correlation” was found between eating breakfast cereals and producing boys.
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