athletes

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease thought to play a role in the deaths (which are sometimes suicides) of athletes, soldiers, and others who have suffered concussions and repeated hits to the head, is currently only able to be diagnosed postmortem.

"After a while it gets old and not so fulfilling to take the brain out when [an athlete] is dead," Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon and director of the Brain Injury Research Institute, told CNN. "At that point there is no solution, no answer."

So a study co-authored by Bailes suggesting that PET scans … Read more

A Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto is using the same transfer paper currently affixing temporary tattoos to kids -- in conjunction with a common screen-printing technique -- to develop a medical sensor that keeps tabs on a person's exertion by monitoring the skin's pH levels.

Similar devices, which are called ion-selective electrodes (ISEs), are already common among athletic trainers and medical researchers to help spot fatigue, dehydration, or even metabolic diseases. But they tend to be bulky and don't stick well to sweaty skin.

The new sensor stays put and doesn't look so, … Read more

It looks like a hockey goalie's blocker glove, and indeed this mitt might help stop more pucks when fatigue takes its toll.

Stanford University researchers are working to improve a device that can rapidly cool the body after an intense workout, allowing faster recovery and performance enhancement that's "substantially better" than steroids.

The $3,000 CoreControl Glove has been on the market for some time. It uses a low-tech blood-cooling method to allow athletes to perform better and longer. Basically, cool water flows into a vacuum around the hand, cooling blood in the palm. … Read more

As I watch the Olympics, I imagine myself in the competition. I'm swimming for a medal, rocketing through the 100-meter dash, and rowing my heart out.

There are some problems with my flights of fancy. I don't have a swimmer's build, a runner's height, or a rower's stamina. To find my best Olympic sport match, I have to turn to the BBC's Olympic athlete body matcher.

Enter your height and weight and it will show you where you are on a plot of Olympic athletes and which Olympian you are closest to in size. The athletes range from a tiny gymnast to a hulking shot putter.… Read more

There may be 100 days to go until the start of the Summer Olympics, but the London Games just got a lot closer.

Today, the International Olympic Committee launched The Hub, a new social-media portal to give fans a way to connect with their favorite sports and athletes and to give the Olympians themselves a way to build their social profiles in the months before the event.

For starters, The Hub will feature a searchable database of many current and former athletes' Facebook and Twitter accounts -- something the IOC hopes will allow athletes to increase their number of followers, … Read more

It's often the case that a device or substance with a known benefit also comes with known risks--typically referred to as side effects and listed quickly at the ends of commercials. So it seems worth noting when a product's side effect may in fact be useful.

The Valkee, a portable headset launched in August of 2010, directs 8- to 12-minute doses of bright light through the ear canal and into the brain to improve seasonal affective disorder. It turns out that this concentration of bright light into the brain may also improve motoric reaction time, according to a study conducted by Verve Research in Finland.

The placebo-controlled study (meaning some were given the treatment and others a placebo in its place) tested the effects of the Valkee headset on Finnish national league ice hockey players and found that those exposed to 12 minutes of light via the headset sped up their already fast reaction times by 20 percent.

"The placebo-controlled study showed a significant improvement in motoric reaction times of top athletes using bright light via the ear canal," says lead researcher Mikko Tulppo in a news release.… Read more

We've seen running bipedal robots before, but they tend to move like, well, robots. Ryuma Niiyama of MIT's Robot Locomotion Group wants to build a bot that runs as much like a human as possible, right down to the black nylon running shorts.

The robot, aptly named Athlete, sports an artificial musculoskeletal system that mirrors human muscles in the leg, hip, lower abdomen, and booty and has a springy elastic blade foot like those seen on prosthetic running legs. Niiyama's goal is a flexible, agile robot with less of a mechanical gait and more of a Usain Bolt-type stride.

Athlete has seven sets of actuator-driven artificial muscles in each leg, plus touch sensors on each foot and an inertial measurement unit on the torso for detecting the body's orientation. It does not, as far as we know, take steroids.

Niiyama--who also worked on Mowgli the bipedal jumping robot--developed Athlete as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tokyo's Department of Mechano-Informatics along with with colleagues Satoshi Nishikawa and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. They presented their research last week at the IEEE Humanoids 2010 conference in Nashville, Tenn.

But the champion sprinters of the world shouldn't worry just yet. With the aid of a harness hung from the ceiling, Athlete can currently take up to five steps at about 3.9 feet per second, but then it falls down. Hey, robots get muscle cramps too. … Read more

Here's one for all the fitness and gadget gurus: the i-dration device.

The prototype bottle, which developer Cambridge Consultants is calling the first in a new generation of hardware apps (although we've found others), dispenses hydration advice by wirelessly transmitting real-time data to a smartphone. The bottle's sensors monitor not only fluid quantity but also temperature and drinking frequency.

The corresponding smartphone app, in turn, uses the phone's built-in accelerometer and gyroscope to measure exercise levels, and then fuses data from a heart-rate chest band with pre-entered details (i.e. height, age, weight) to assess the … Read more

COED Magazine produces sexy (but SFW!) content that makes a perfect match for CNET's The 404 Podcast, so we're excited to have Editor-in-Chief Stephen Gebhardt in the guest chair today to chat about the genesis of COED Mag, a scourge of suggestive Katy Perry GIFs, 15 signs you're an Internet weirdo, and "Back to the Future" returning to movie theaters! As you might've guessed, Wilson spends the entire episode shaking his head and fielding calls from the FCC.

COED Magazine is a comprehensive Web publication that caters to a lot of different interests like MMA, sports, tech news, and media, but you can guess the main focus of a Web site with "COED" in the name (queue Wilson scrambling to remove screenshots from the video recording).

Stephen tells us that Katy Perry is driving a ton of traffic to the site, thanks to her appearance on SNL and her cleavage-filled appearance on "Sesame Street." To cash in on her fame, COED presents the 15 most suggestive Katy Perry animated GIFs. If you're like us, these are sure to end your workday productivity, so don't say we didn't warn you.

We also enjoyed this article on the 15 signs you're an Internet weirdo, but mostly because almost all of them apply to The 404 in one host or another. For example, #10: You can't go five minutes without checking your e-mail obviously applies to Wilson, while #1 You play games more hours per week than you work at an actual job sounds like Jeff, and me? Well, it might be easier to read the list and guess which don't sound like something I'd do in the privacy of my own browser.

There's plenty more fun on today's episode with Stephen Gebhardt, including a list of 10 movies about video games that don't suck and some news about "Back to the Future," so enjoy the episode and follow along at COED Magazine!