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  1. 11 HR AGO

    Jennifer B. Fields, University of Connecticut - Too Many Young Athletes Are Flunking Nutrition

    On University of Connecticut Sports Science Week: Nutrition is important for athletics, so why are so many athletes poorly informed? Jennifer B. Fields, Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, investigates this question. Jennifer Fields is an assistant professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences within the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources at the University of Connecticut. Earning her BS at the University of Maryland in 2013, she went on to earn an MS in health promotion and nutrition education at American University and a Ph.D. in Kinesiology at George Mason University. Her research interests focus on optimizing athlete health and sport performance through investigations into low energy availability, nutritional status, nutritional interventions, body composition, and sport technology. High school student-athletes face unique nutritional challenges. Specifically, they’re training hard while still growing, which increases their energy and nutrient needs compared to adults. If their nutritional needs aren’t met, it can lead to decreased performance and longer recovery, heightened risk of injury, and low energy availability which may have long-lasting effects on their overall health. Unlike collegiate or professional athletes, most high school athletes don’t have access to sports dietitians or formal nutrition education, so their eating habits are often shaped by their parents, social media, or socioeconomic factors. Research also shows that better nutrition knowledge is linked to healthier eating habits, suggesting that education could make a real difference. So, our main question was: do high school athletes truly understand their energy and macronutrient needs, and what is their current level of sports nutrition knowledge?To explore this, we recruited high school athletes, both boys and girls, and had them complete 2 surveys: one was a validated sports-nutrition knowledge questionnaire and the other was an internally developed survey where they self-reported what they believed their energy and macronutrient needs were for their sport. Then we compared those beliefs against evidence-based recommendations from the International Society of Sports Nutrition.What we found turned out to be pretty interesting. On the knowledge test, athletes correctly answered only about 43-45% of questions, which was classified as “poor knowledge.” And when we looked at their perceived dietary requirements, they significantly underestimated how many calories and carbohydrates they needed, while highly overestimating how much protein and fat they needed. Overall, it’s recommended that high school athletes be exposed to more educational interventions focused on general nutrition concepts, sports-related fueling strategies, and the unique dietary requirements of athletes to help them better understand fueling strategies for optimal performance and health. Read More:[UConn Today] - On the Field with Sports Nutritionist Jennifer Fields [MDPI] - Nutrition Knowledge and Perceived Dietary Requirements of Adolescent Student-Athletes: A Pilot Study This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

    3 min

  2. 1 DAY AGO

    Julie P. Burland, University of Connecticut - Predicting In-Season Injuries Among Women's Basketball Players

    On University of Connecticut Sports Science Week: Predicting injuries could be key to team success. Julie P. Burland, director of research at the Institute for Sports Medicine, examines this possibility. Julie Burland’s research background is in the evaluation and recovery of neuromuscular function and psychosocial factors influencing postoperative and return to sport outcomes after ACL reconstruction. Specifically her work has proposed the presence of learned helplessness, a psychobehavioral phenomenon, and its direct link to neurological alterations after ACLR. This work also explores how learned helplessness may influence other clinically relevant outcomes such as lower extremity biomechanics, quadriceps health and perceived function. Developing this knowledge base will help to inform future rehabilitation practices and return to physical activity progressions after ACL reconstruction. Her long-term career objective is to continue to produce research that will help advance clinical rehabilitation science and effectively translate this knowledge to clinicians in order to promote lower extremity joint health, psychosocial well-being and long-term quality of life across active populations. I have long been concerned about the continued high rate of lower-extremity injuries—especially ACL tears and ankle sprains—among female basketball players. These injuries not only sideline athletes but also heighten their risk of developing early-onset osteoarthritis. Traditional training and injury prevention strategies may help, but they don’t reveal which athletes are most vulnerable injury due to high repetitive impact load during a long season. Meanwhile, in military and tactical populations, elevated markers of cartilage metabolism have been linked to subsequent ACL injuries—suggesting a biomolecular signal might flag risk before a tear occurs. So my question became: could we translate these military findings to our traditional athlete and combine wearable sensors and blood biomarkers to pinpoint athletes at elevated risk?Over the course of a collegiate women’s basketball season, I tracked eleven athletes from preseason to postseason. We outfitted them with inertial measurement units on both lower legs to capture cumulative impact loading, bone stimulus, and step intensity during practice sessions. At six distinct times throughout the season, we drew blood and analyzed cartilage synthesis markers (CPII and CS846) and degradation markers (C2C). Injury incidence was recorded daily in collaboration with the team’s athletic trainer. We then evaluated correlations among impact loading, biomarker trajectories, and injury outcomes.Our results showed that preseason and early-season moderate-to-high impacts (6–200 g) were significantly associated with later lower-extremity injuries. Increases in CS846 and CPII were linked with cumulative bone stimulus and predicted overall injury incidence. Notably, elevated CS846 values measured before and early in the season were particularly indicative of higher injury risk.Together, these findings suggest that mechanical loading and cartilage biology converge to shape injury vulnerability. Monitoring both impact and biomarkers may usher in a new, more proactive era in sports medicine—one where at-risk individuals can be identified before an injury ever happens. Read More:[UConn Today] - Biomarkers Predict In-Season Injuries for Women’s Basketball Players [ScienceDirect] - Cumulative Impact Loading and Cartilage Synthesis Biomarkers May Be Associated With Injury Risk in Female Collegiate Basketball Players This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

    3 min

  3. 4 DAYS AGO

    Paul Gölz, Cornell University - How Math Can Save You a Family Fight

    On Cornell Engineering Week: Dividing up a bundle of items fairly can be very tricky, especially for families. Paul Gölz, assistant professor of operations research and information engineering, looks to mathematics for help. Paul Gölz is an assistant professor at Cornell University. He studies the algorithms and mathematics of democracy and fairness, and how these fields can inform AI development. Picture three siblings dividing an inheritance. One is fond of a piece of art, the others could both use the car, everyone wants the dining table, … and suddenly they’re fighting over how to split the goods. Whether you’re splitting an estate or Halloween candy, mathematics can help by making precise when a division is “fair” and by creating procedures that find one. Ideally, we’d like a division that is envy-free, which means that no sibling prefers another sibling’s bundle of items over their own. But perfect envy-freeness isn’t always possible—say if everyone wants the car. So, researchers in the area of fair division developed a more flexible standard of fairness, which allows for some envy, but only a small amount: your envy for another’s bundle should disappear if you could remove just one item from it. This axiom works well because it’s always achievable when dividing items across individuals. But here is a twist: what if the siblings have spouses? A division that seems fair to the siblings could still leave a spouse thinking their household got shortchanged, based on how the spouse values the items. Can we divide them so that the siblings and their spouses find the allocation fair? For two couples, we prove that the answer is yes; such a division always exists. But add another couple, and sometimes no division will satisfy everyone. That’s the bad news. The good news? We developed an algorithm that works for any number of couples, which guarantees a different fairness axiom called proportionality: every person feels that their group received at least their fair share of the total value, give or take a few items. This algorithm offers a mathematically fair way to divide goods among households or other groups of people—and hopefully to avoid an argument. Read More:Fair Division Among Couples and Small Groups This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

    3 min
  4. Hunter Adams, Cornell University - Can We Save The Planet By Turning It Into a Computer?

    5 DAYS AGO

    Hunter Adams, Cornell University - Can We Save The Planet By Turning It Into a Computer?

    On Cornell Engineering Week: What can the natural world tell us about computers? Hunter Adams, assistant teaching professor of electrical and computer engineering, examines what we can learn from nature. Hunter Adams is an assistant teaching professor at Cornell University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. As a former Cornell student with degrees in physics and aerospace engineering, he worked in the Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics before joining the Space Systems Design Studio where he managed a team of engineers constructing a spacecraft called Violet. As a faculty member, Adams enjoys working with students and collaborating with researchers in a range of disciplines, including plant sciences, veterinary science, electrical engineering, ornithology, and computer science. Let me ask you a deceptively difficult question: What is a computer?We can all point to examples of computers. Things like laptops, cell phones, slide rules, and calculators. But what is the property that all these items share which makes them computers? Are there other objects, objects that we don’t typically think of as “computers,” which share this property?Here’s a definition: a computer is anything which usefully transforms one quantity into another quantity. All of the engineered systems that I’ve just listed share this property, but so do many natural systems that we don’t typically think of as computers!We could point to lots of examples. Want to find the shortest path through a complicated environment? No need to build a computer or write a program, just re- create that environment around an ant colony and allow them to find the path for you! Want to classify objects moving through a forest? The woodland creatures react in different ways to different sorts of intrusions. Use the birds, bees, and megafauna as a giant neural net that performs classification by way of their unique responses to cars, people, drones, or whatever else.These and other natural systems are modeled by equations, and the goal of many scientists is to find these equations. But any system that can be modeled by an equation can also be used as a special-purpose computer for solving that equation! Natural computing does not use math to model nature, it uses nature to do math, and to store and process data!The supercomputers of the future will not be constructed at the cost of nature, but will include nature. In addition to giving us access to lots more compute, this has the potential to guarantee nature’s preservation. As soon as healthy forests generate more dollars than lumber, we won’t need fences around our forests. The economic value of the forest, and of all other natural systems, may lay in its ability to process, store, and move data.Maybe, we can save the planet by turning it into a computer. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

    3 min

  5. 6 DAYS AGO

    Eve Donnelly, Cornell University - The Hidden Science Inside Our Bones

    On Cornell Engineering Week: There are still mysteries to uncover about the bones in our body. Eve Donnelly, associate professor of materials science and engineering, looks into some to find out. Eve Donnelly is an associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University, where her research focuses on the microscopic structure and composition of connective tissues, especially bone, determine their strength, resilience, and susceptibility to fracture. Her work focuses on how the organic and inorganic components of bone interact to create its mechanical properties, and how those interactions change in disease. The long-term goal of her research is to integrate materials science with orthopedic medicine to uncover the mechanisms behind pathologic fractures. We tend to think we’ve got bones all figured out. They hold us up, protect our organs, and – as we have learned from a young age – they get stronger with calcium, vitamin D, and exercise. But there is still a lot we don’t understand about what makes bones truly strong and healthy.Take Type 2 diabetes, for example. People with this condition tend to have denser bones than average. One would think that would make them less likely to break. Yet, paradoxically, people with diabetes are more likely to have fractures.In my lab, we study why. It turns out that having more bone isn’t the same as having better bone. Healthy bone is a natural composite, part mineral for strength, part collagen for flexibility. In diabetes, excess sugar in the bloodstream can stick to the collagen and form unwanted crosslinks that make the tissue more brittle.We used high-resolution imaging and other techniques to look deep inside diabetic bone and found that it has more of the harmful crosslinks and less renewal of old bone by the bone cells, which could allow it to develop tiny cracks that build up over time. So even when the bone looks fine on a density scan, it’s more fragile than it seems.This research helps explain why current diagnostic tools, which focus mainly on bone density, can fail to predict fracture risk in people with diabetes. By uncovering how sugar compounds alter bone material, we can work toward better screening methods, and therapies that promote bone quality, not just density.Bones may look simple on the surface, but they’re remarkable, living materials that hold mysteries we’re only beginning to unravel. And each new discovery brings us closer to understanding how to keep our bones healthy and resilient for a lifetime. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

    3 min

  6. 10 MAR

    Chloe Arson, Cornell University - What Makes Deep Geothermal District Heating Different?

    On Cornell Engineering Week: A solution to heating our homes more efficiently may be right under our feet. Chloe Arson, professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, digs down to explore. Chloé Arson is a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University with expertise is damage and healing rock mechanics, micro-macro modeling of porous media, and computational geomechanics. Her research group develops numerical tools to assess the performance and environmental impacts of underground storage and rock fracturing, explain the formation of soil by rock weathering, and design sustainable bio-inspired geotechnical systems. Arson’s latest line of research investigates the use of artificial intelligence to optimize subsurface exploration and enhance multi-scale geomechanical models. You may be familiar with homes being conditioned by geothermal energy, using shallow heat pumps that circulate pipes a few hundred feet underground to warm buildings in winter and cool them in summer. But that’s just scratching the surface. Deeper underground, the Earth gets hotter – a steady rise called the geothermal gradient. Those higher temperatures open up new possibilities for supplying heat to multiple buildings or even industrial facilities – things shallow geothermal systems can’t do. That’s where deep geothermal systems come in. Heat is harvested by drilling kilometers down and circulating fluid through fractures in the hot rock. When the subsurface is not permeable enough to circulate the fluid, it is possible to build an Enhanced Geothermal System, or EGS for short. “Enhanced” means that the rock is stimulated to open or create fractures prior to operations. The EGS technology makes it possible to harvest heat nearly anywhere. In Utah and Nevada, two-mile-deep enhanced geothermal systems have produced electricity. In the eastern U.S., the rocks are about three times less hot at similar depth, which is not economically practical for power generation, but is ideal for heating buildings directly. Cornell University recently drilled a two-mile-deep borehole to assess the feasibility of EGS for direct heat production, but many challenges to deploying this type of system still exist. The economic potential for direct heat-generating enhanced geothermal systems is on the order of 320 gigawatt-thermal units in the United States, enough to heat about 45 million households. Clean, renewable heat is beneath our feet. The challenge now is to build the infrastructure. Read More:Earth Source Heat - Cornell University This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

    3 min

  7. 9 MAR

    Nozomi Nishimura, Cornell University - It's Time to Finally Unravel Menopause Through Science

    On Cornell Engineering Week: We still have much to unravel about menopause. Nozomi Nishimura, associate professor of biomedical engineering, says science can help. Nozomi Nishimura is an associate professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University and director of the Menopause Health Engineering initiative, which aims to unravel the science of menopause. Her research expands the use of in vivo imaging techniques to study a variety of disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, cardiac disease and cancer metastasis. Her lab’s strategy is to develop novel tools to image the contribution of multiple physiological systems to diseases, including multiphoton microscopy to image cell dynamics and femtosecond laser ablation and quantitative analysis to dissect function in living systems. Despite decades of biomedical progress, we still don’t fully understand what happens in the body during menopause, or how its hormonal changes cascade through biological systems like the brain, heart, bones, and metabolic network. The result is that billions of people will experience symptoms and health risks that science can describe, but not yet predict or prevent.That’s because menopause isn’t a single switch that flips. It’s a systems-level process. As estrogen levels fall, the effects ripple across nearly every organ, influencing metabolism, inflammation, cognition, and even the mechanical properties of tissue. Osteoporosis, for example, is one potential outcome related to menopause, and is tied not only to bone health, but muscle and metabolic health. It also plays a significant role in breast cancer risk and progression.Understanding intertwined problems like menopause and multi-organ diseases requires integrative, cross-disciplinary science. The Menopause Health Engineering initiative is bringing together experts from engineering, medicine, and life sciences to create computational models, imaging tools, and “body-on-a-chip” platforms that will reveal how menopause reshapes the body over time.The research initiative aims to inspire a broader movement: to treat menopause not as a medical afterthought, but as a rich, untapped domain for discovery. By elevating menopause research to a national scientific priority, we could transform not just women’s health, but our understanding of human resilience and longevity itself. Menopause isn’t the end of biology – it’s a key to unlocking it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

    3 min

  8. 6 MAR

    Amit Pathak, Washington University in St. Louis - Cells Mechanically Sense Beyond Their Surroundings

    What does the fairy tale of the princess and the pea have to teach us about our cells? Amit Pathak, professor of mechanical engineer and materials science at Washington University in St. Louis, feels the way through the research. Amit Pathak is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on mechanobiology, exploring how cells sense and respond to mechanical properties of their environment, with applications in cancer metastasis, wound healing, and tissue engineering. While diseases are traditionally defined by genetic alterations in cells, our bodies undergo mechanical changes as well. In my lab, we study mechanobiology, which asks: how do cells respond to the physical world around them?Over the last two decades, scientists have learned that cells aren’t just passive blobs. They actually sense the stiffness of the surfaces they stick to. This sensing—called mechanotransduction—guides how cells move, grow, and even turn into diseased versions of themselves.In a recent study, we found something surprising. Groups of epithelial cells—the kind that line your organs—can feel through layers of fibrous collagen up to 100 microns deep. It’s a bit like the fairy tale of the princess and the pea. She could feel a tiny pea under a pile of mattresses. In real life, it’s like the difference between sleeping on a mattress on the floor versus one on a bed frame—you feel the support differently. The epithelial cell clusters in our experiments did something similar: they push and pull on their surroundings to “feel” what’s beneath. Depending on the stiffness of their distant layers, which could be soft tissue, a hard tumor, or bone in the body, cells change how they move. This is an emergent property of cell collectives, because single cells can only sense a few microns deep. Based on this work, we suspect there may be specific regulatory proteins that help cells sense distant, disease-like environments—ones we may have overlooked. This kind of long-distance sensing could reveal new targets for cancer therapy.That’s the core mission of my lab: to understand whether and how cells can sense distant environments—ones they’ve encountered before, or ones they’re moving toward. If true, this could mean that mechanical memory shapes how cancer spreads or how healthy cells respond to nearby tumors. Read More: [PNAS] - Emergent depth-mechanosensing of epithelial collectives regulates cell clustering and dispersal on layered matrices Cellular Mechanobiology Laboratory This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit academicminute.substack.com

    3 min
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