Helen FieldsScience Writer

Forget lessons. You can get better at putting just by using a famous person’s golf club. Ok, not even. A golf club that you are *told* belonged to a famous person. I wrote about it for ScienceNOW today.

Confidence is really important in sports, and people with more confidence do better. I mean, confidence isn’t going to make me better at basketball than Michael Jordan. But it’ll make me better at basketball than me without confidence. Crazy, huh? Brains are powerful.

A lot of endurance athletes have some kind of training regimen that includes being at high altitudes. When you’re at high altitudes, there’s not very much oxygen. That stimulates your body to make extra red blood cells and otherwise adapt to hypoxia. It’s the same kind of benefit cyclists get from blood doping (only it’s not against the rules). Blood doping, in case you need a review – I did – is when you get yourself extra blood, either by taking someone else’s, banking your own and injecting it before a competition, or taking erythropoeitin (EPO) to stimulate red blood cell production.

This week for ScienceNOW, I wrote about a study on people who have a particular genetic mutation that means their bodies always act like they’re low on oxygen. It might help suggest an upper limit to how much benefit athletes can get out of staying at high altitude.

A number of national teams spent time at high elevations before the World Cup – but that may have had more to do with acclimitization, because four of the nine stadiums are over 4,000 feet. If you’re going to run for an hour and a half plus possible extra time at 5,500 feet, you don’t want it be your first day after coming up from sea level.

Oh, man. I can’t believe it took me until now to think to look for sumo videos on youtube. Yeah, that’s right, sumo. I lived in Japan for two years in the late 1990s and spent a substantial part of that two years watching sumo tournaments – they’re on TV six times a year for two weeks each time, and I was right there watching them in their commercial-free glory.

I don’t feel the highlight reels (two big guys smash into each other! one of them falls over! two more guys smash into each other! etc!) remotely capture the experience – yes, the bouts are very short, but there’s several minutes of buildup before each one. The guys throw salt in the air to purify the ring, smack themselves, line up at the starting line, stare down the other guy, go back and get more salt, repeat, repeat – here, this shows a whole bout from the time they’re announced to the time the winner gets his prize:

(Fun fact: Both of these wrestlers are Mongolian.) A bout is lost when one of the competitors steps outside the ring or touches the ground with anything but bottom of his feet. It’s a tiny ring, and they’re big guys, so momentum is a problem. The shortest bouts are when one wrestler just steps out of the way and his opponent runs out of the ring. (Shortest and also funniest.) If a bout goes over a minute, it’s really, really long. If it goes four minutes, they get to take a break.

Why was I so obsessed with sumo? Well, all the preparation is kind of hypnotic, that’s one thing. The bouts can go a lot of different ways. The ring is really high, and 300-pound men routinely fall off of it into the front row of spectators – you don’t get with other sports. And it’s just so odd. I mean, the referee is dressed like a priest.

Ah, I miss Japan.

The world championships in track & field were in Berlin last week. I kept forgetting to watch them on TV, so what I saw – the grand total – was the men’s high jump final, about five minutes of men’s racewalking when a TV was on at work, and a few minutes of women’s discus. I did keep seeing athletes wandering around town with their shiny passes around their necks, so that was exciting.

This kid is not a competitor. He’s on a runway set up by Puma in Alexanderplatz – he’s running past speed cameras that flash your kilometers per hour on a board. I think it would be a lot more interesting if they told you how fast you can run 100 meters. Note the Jamaica colors – and there’s even a little Jamaican bar/hut thing in the background, playing reggae.

Sunday’s post is about the sounds on the ship – each picture links to an associated sound. Chris suggested it because, well, we were stuck. There was no sampling on Sunday. The ship steamed northwest all day to escape a storm. The TV in the science conference lounge was, as I mentioned, on the NFL draft. I mean, seriously? Spending all day watching boys get picked for teams? Swooping the cameras around does not turn that into compelling television.

We had some ideas but they were all going to require a lot of work, on a day when most people were taking it easy. Heck, it was Saturday, and the Coast Guard celebrates the weekend, more or less. That’s why the sound post was so brilliant: Chris already had about half the sounds and we knew how to get the others, then he took some pictures of everyday objects and I wrote about them and, ta-da, we were done.

And the post turned out great. It’s a big hit on the ship and I’ve been getting nice comments from land, too. I’m proud of the posts that have explained tough science, but it’s nice that a quick little dispatch about our daily lives can work out well, too.

Of course, I also like it because I’m in one of the pictures.