A Bluetooth-connected foam ball packed with sensors and a battery you need to charge sounds like one of Silicon Valley’s worst ideas. Haven’t balls been adequately entertaining kids for centuries already? But it only took one toss of Play Impossible’s Gameball for me to understand why a ball upgraded with…
Athletes are generally willing to entertain any scientific-sounding trend that promises an edge. For reference: Michael Phelps and cupping or Shaquille O’Neal’s energy-enhancing bracelets.
Aside from the opening ceremonies, how many Olympic events did you watch over the past few weeks? Very few, right? It’s about time the IOC started spicing up the games so they’re more interesting—like letting athletes compete with the aid of electric skateboards, starting with the pole vault.
It seems not even basketball court jester is a job that’s safe from from the rise of the machines. Students from Georgia Tech built a giant Rube Goldberg contraption that’s capable of reproducing many of the Harlem Globetrotter’s most crowd-pleasing tricks; from spinning a ball on a finger, to simply sinking baskets.
The shelves of drug-testing laboratories in dozens of countries are stocked with biological samples from the best athletes in the world, who deliver blood and urine for investigators to test for banned performance-enhancing substances. They’re a veritable gold mine for scientists looking to figure out what, exactly,…
Evgenia Medvedeva is known for two things: 1) being an incredible figure skater—she competed in the Olympics earlier today—and 2) loving Sailor Moon. This resulted in a fantastic Sailor Moon-inspired routine she performed at the 2017 ISU World Team Trophy. And that’s resulted in someone making a video that matches her…
In 2014, the former Soviet nation of Uzbekistan announced a plan that it hoped would give it a leg up in future Olympic games: It would DNA test Uzbek children to determine their athletic potential.
Humans do the wildest things to animals—stick them with experimental drugs, mash them into cheap nuggets, mount their severed heads on dining room walls. Against this backdrop of chaos and mass extermination the Puppy Bowl seems fairly benign, as do all those other events, like the Kentucky Derby, where animals are…
The self-balancing technology that powered the overhyped disappointment that was the Segway is finally living up to its full potential with Hexbug’s new VEX Battling Boxing Robots line. You can not only build a pair of robo-pugilists that ride around on hoverboards, you can also fight them using motion controls to…
Russia was banned from competing in the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, a sweeping punishment for its brazen state-sponsored doping program, exposed in 2016. But even with the added scrutiny of athletes in 2018, the percentage of athletes using banned substances in Pyeongchang is probably lower than it was in Rio in…
The IT company supporting the Winter Olympics apparently never had a chance. According to CyberScoop, it was hacked well before the Pyeongchang games ever began.
Before I went curling last month with my partner’s family at the Grand Forks Curling Club in North Dakota, I figured that getting the basics down would be simple enough. Push a heavy rock hard enough to get it to the other side of the ice, and that’s it, right? Wrong. I was in for a much more complicated physics…
Nearly three thousand athletes have made their way to the Winter Olympic this month, and probably at least a couple are cursing the day they ever decided to become world-class bobsledders: Reports out of Pyeongchang list the temperature at or around a murderous subzero, putting this year’s games on track to be the…
Remember the feelings of thrill and terror when you launched your sled down a steep snow-covered hill? American Skeleton racer John Daly has been doing that competitively for 15 years, but his sled, which slides down an ice-covered bobsled using a pair of metal runners, can actually hit speeds of up to 90 miles per…
Yesterday Disney CEO Bob Iger went on CNBC’s Closing Bell to talk about the company’s earnings, and brag about Black Panther’s extraordinary ticket pre-sales. During the course of the chat he mentioned a new streaming service for ESPN that’s expected to go for $5 a month. That might sound cheap, but by all accounts it…
In a few short days the Olympics will descend upon the Earth, and with it will come hundreds of stories of triumph and failure that you need to be able to watch—or at least talk about the next day. Your best friend is about to turn into an ice skating expert, and your brother is going to painstakingly explain the…
When footage of CBS’s 1967 coverage of Super Bowl I first emerged from the ashes seven years ago, sports historians reacted with glee. Long considered one of the Holy Grails of sportscasting history, the footage, found on a set of two-inch Quadruplex video tapes in a dusty Pennsylvania attic, provided a rare glimpse…
In her book The Imagineers of War, author Sharon Weinberger recounts one of the first deployments of simulation training: to improve America’s performance in a NATO mock tank battle that the US consistently performed poorly in, nicknamed the Canadian Army Trophy. After implementing DARPA’s rudimentary…
From the free-throw line—a distance of just 15 feet—I can maybe put the ball in the basket about twenty percent of the time. I’m not NBA material, but the league might consider drafting the guys from YouTube’s How Ridiculous, who just nailed a seemingly impossible 660-foot basketball shot.
The clever software that stabilizes bumpy video and turns it into smooth as silk footage works by tracking various targets in a clip so it can calculate the camera’s erratic movements. Here’s what happens when you instead tell it to stabilize footage by tracking just a single male nipple.
