1.
Studying roller derby for science:
The authors used a tournament happening at Eugene, Oregon with the Emerald City Roller Girls (the host, from Eugene), DC Roller Girls (Washington, DC) and Silicon Valley Roller Girls (San Jose, CA). They were able to test a few conditions: the teams’ microbial communities before playing, after playing one bout, and after playing two bouts, to see change over time and over contact with different team microbial communities. They sampled from the upper arm, because it’s probably the body part with the most universal exposure across players.
2.
Hollywood Reporter:
The Associated Press is being sued by the documentary makers of the film Hart Island: An American Cemetery, about a small potter's field island in New York City where prison laborers bury the region's unclaimed mass dead in mass graves. The film features four individuals and their six-year struggle to navigate city bureaucracy to locate a body mistakenly buried and properly grieve.
The reason why footage of Hart Island is so valuable is that NYC's Department of Corrections prohibits filming there.
3. Seems like just a few weeks ago that ESPN
had a long article about praising undersized white athletes for their grit instead of trying to calculate how valuable they actually were to their team. Here's a new ESPN
article about college basketball player Aaron Craft, filled with anecdotes like this:
This is the way he's always been. When Craft was 3 years old, he stuck his father's keys into an electrical outlet while John ran a basketball practice. The shock knocked him off his feet, but the toddler refused to cry.
