Olympic biathletes are better than you at breathing

Olympic biathletes are better than you at breathing

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Back in 1767, Norwegian border patrol troops had far too much time on their hands. So they decided to put their two best skills —firing a gun and cross country skiing—to good use. The bored border patrollers created a competition out of it to see who could shoot the straightest and ski the hardest. They called the sport “military patrol,” because, well, they were Norwegian border patrol men. Today, we call it “biathlon.”

“Military patrol” made its debut as a demonstration at the 1924 Winter Olympics, but it wasn’t until it gained popularity as a sport that it became “biathlon,” and in 1960 it became an official Winter Olympic sport under that name.

To compete, athletes have to be able to cross-country ski for up to 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) for men and 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) for women, which is divided up across several segments interspersed with shooting ranges. The ranges have five targets, and you have one (literal) shot at each. You race for time, and you’re penalized for missing a target either by directly adding time to your final score or by making you ski an extra loop on the track. There are five different types of biathlon races, each with slightly different rules, but they’re all unified by one thing: You have to ski as fast as you possibly can and then shoot tiny targets from 160 feet away.

Cross-country skiing is challenging. During the race, a skier’s heart pumps, or beats, at roughly 90 percent of its maximum allowable rate. It’s an all out sprint like any other Olympic race, but when you’re done, you have to switch gears and fire a steady shot. When your blood moves that fast through your veins, you actually see the effects. “You’re watching the target come in and out of your sight,” says Sara Studebaker-Hall, a two-time Olympic biathlon competitor for the U.S. “The example we give to people is it’s like running up a flight of stairs as fast as you can and then trying to thread a needle.”

But it’s actually one step further than that, because any normal person would take a moment of two to catch their breath before they hold a super sharp object. Biathlon competitors don’t get that luxury.

“The best athletes in the world are in the shooting belt for 20 to 25 seconds,” Studebaker-Hall explains, “so you spend a lot of time training to shoot at a fairly high heart rate.”

In fact, Studebaker-Hall doesn’t want her heart rate to drop too much. If your heart is going fast enough, she explains, it’s pumping so quickly that you don’t really notice, and equally when it’s going slowly you aren’t conscious of it beating, she explains. But when you’re just above normal, you’re hyper-aware of every beat. That pounding can be felt in your grip on the rifle. “You don’t want to dip down into that region,” she says. “That’s one of the reasons you end up shooting so fast.”

Which is not to say that heart rates don’t drop at all. The few studies done on changes in heart rates during biathlons suggest that athletes drop their rates to about 60 to 70 percent of their max, versus 90 percent during the race. Most normal exercise happens in the 70-85 percent range, for reference. Their heart rates drop less when shooting upright as opposed to lying on their stomachs, but that’s still a significant drop considering it happens in less than a minute. They’re actively slowing down their own pulse through breathing and concentration, not just letting their heart slow on its own.

You also can’t keep your heart rate up too high, because shooting is as much a mental game as it is a physical one. If your heart is going all-out, you may not notice the beats but you’ll have a hard time focusing enough to get the shot right. So how do you hit a 1.6-inch-wide circular target from 160 feet away as you’re breathing heavily? “You breath out to the natural bottom of your breath,” says Studebaker-Hall. “It’s a natural pause point, and that’s where you take the shot.”

Though she’s focused on her breath, she also happens to be using a technique that seems to be unconsciously used by other marksmen. “Elite rifle shooters are more precise when the timing of triggering happens in the beginning or the end of the R-R interval,” explains Harri Luchsinger, a researcher who studies the science of human movement at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and is one of the few scientists to examine the sport of biathlon from a scientific perspective. The “R-R interval” is scientific jargon for the period between the peaks of your heart beat. You can hear the peak in your own heartbeat—it’s right about when the thumping noise happens. That’s your heart contracting and squeezing blood out into your arteries, and it’s also when the electrical peak in your heartbeat occurs. In other words, shooters are more precise when they take the shot in between beats. “I don’t think that athletes actively think about shooting in this part of the heart beat,” Luchsinger says, “but this adaption merely comes naturally from tens of thousands of repetitions.”

Shooting at the bottom of each breath should help to time the shot to a break in your heart beats because, as Luchsinger explains, your heart rate changes a bit with every breath. As you inhale, it beats a bit faster and it slows down on the exhale.

Studebaker-Hall says she isn’t thinking about any of that, just as Luchsinger suspected. In fact, she says everyone always asks her how she slows her heart rate down to shoot, but that “it’s a little bit of a confusing question, because from the athlete side that’s not what we think about. I think about my breath.” She says she just knows what it feels like to be in her sweet spot—her excellence is subconscious.

It might seem like a crazy sport to the rest of us—who aims to become an expert skier and an expert marksman? But then again, excelling at two totally disparate skills can be thrilling. “Biathlon is so amazing when it goes right,” Studebaker-Hall says. She recalls one race, in particular, during the Games in Sochi: She was skiing her leg of the relay race and came into the shooting range and just felt it. “I shot really well. I hit all my targets and that moved us up a few places,” she says. “The trick is to not let yourself freak out. As soon as you let yourself be aware of the crowd and realize that ‘oh my god I’m at the Olympics’—that’s when it’s all over.”

Tech

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now http://ift.tt/2k2uJQn

February 12, 2018 at 07:09AM

Study Backs Up Creeping Feeling That Facebook Is Just for Old People Now

Study Backs Up Creeping Feeling That Facebook Is Just for Old People Now

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Is Facebook losing itself to the olds? A new study released from research firm eMarketer predicts Facebook lost 2.8 million users under the age of 25 last year as many of them move to the aggressively youthful Snapchat.

eMarketer is an outside research firm without privileged access to Facebook’s numbers, so take these numbers more as estimates than exact figures. Still, the study is sure to come as good news to Snapchat. The platform struggled with user growth early last year as Facebook introduced the Instagram Stories feature, a blatant Snap clone that nonetheless boosted its user base.

Facebook lost users in all three “youth” groups: users under 11 years old, 12- to 17-year-olds, and 18 to 24 years old. Facebook’s steepest estimated drop last year, according to eMarketer, was in the middle category: 1.4 million teens were no longer regular users. Facebook’s estimated drop in younger users last year dovetails neatly with Snap’s growth in 2017, when it gained about 1.9 million users under 25. We reached out to Facebook to comment on Marketer’s numbers and will update if we heard back.

Facebook still reigns supreme with its 1.4 billion daily users compared to Snapchat’s 187 million, but the changes in user growth reflect a longstanding cultural truth: what old people like isn’t cool. It’s entirely possible that Facebook is less popular with young people precisely because it’s so popular with older people. Can a platform be “cool” if your aunt, grandfather, and third grade teacher all use it? By contrast, Snapchat, even after its loathed-by-teens redesign, is notoriously difficult to pick up and use. That’s kept it from mainstream success, but part of its appeal may be that older people don’t “get it.”

Ultimately, youth is an immensely valuable currency in the online attention economy. It’s morbid, with an older user base, every decade or so Facebook will lose a certain percentage of its user base to old age. In its first eight years, 30 million users died. With billions of users worldwide, that means millions of people will make up Facebook’s digital graveyard. Snapchat is smaller, younger, and, in addition to advertisers’ bottomless appetites for youthful spending, it almost certainly has highly valuable insights into what the next generation of online users want.

Tech

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

February 12, 2018 at 09:00AM

AMD’s Newest Processors Are So Good You Can Skip the Graphics Card

AMD’s Newest Processors Are So Good You Can Skip the Graphics Card

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All images: Alex Cranz/Gizmodo

In the past year, graphics cards have gone from the reasonably priced computer part you pick up on Amazon or Newegg to something bordering on as precious as gold. If you happen to find one being sold at its MSRP, you can easily snatch it up and sell it on Amazon for twice the price. The market has gotten so cutthroat in the face of a GPU shortage that vendors like Microcenter have limited the number of GPUs you can buy and will only sell at the original MSRP if you can prove you’re buying it for personal use. And into this fierce market enters AMD with a new CPU with an integrated graphics card so good you can leave the other GPUs to the cryptominers.

Today, AMD is launching two new APUs, or accelerated processing units, that are way cheaper than their Intel rivals but with performance that’s far better. APU, if you’re unfamiliar, is the AMD-coined term for a CPU with integrated graphics. APUs, and CPUs with integrated graphics, don’t need an additional graphics card (or GPU) in order to function, and right now that is a very big deal.

These two new APUs are very good at what they do, and they easily rival their Intel competitors, while also being faster than even some low-end graphics cards available. If you’ve been thinking about building up a new PC for casual gaming, or looking to build your first PC on the cheap, then these APUs are intended for you.

The AMD Ryzen 5 2400G retails for $170 and is roughly comparable to Intel’s $255 i5-8600K. The AMD Ryzen 3 2200G goes for a crazy cheap $100 and is roughly comparable to Intel’s $170 i3 8350K. That $70 to $85 difference is nothing new for AMD. It sells a lot fewer CPUs than Intel and has always undercut its primary competitor, but now it’s selling processors that aren’t only cheaper, but far better choices for people who have no plans to buy a separate graphics card.

The reason these new CPUs are so good at graphics is that AMD makes really good graphics cards too. That’s a key difference between it and Intel. GPUs are built into AMD’s DNA, and thus it can, the theory goes, better implement integrated graphics than Intel. Intel gets that too—it’s why it partnered with AMD on a new series of chips earlier this year, and why it poached AMD’s lead GPU architect last year.

When it comes to integrated graphics the proof is in the benchmarks—particularly the gaming ones. Simply put, the AMD Ryzen APUs have the fastest integrated graphics you can buy right now. Even when compared to the integrated graphics in Intel’s top-of-the-line desktop processor, the $360 Intel i7-8700K AMD’s budget APUs are tremendous. The Ryzen 3 and Ryzen 5 have the same integrated graphics chip that’s based on AMD’s Vega microarchitecture, and consequently they pull nearly identical numbers. Both were twice as fast at rendering frames in the Civilization VI benchmark we use, and both rendered five times as many frames per second in the Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark.

Below you can see the benchmark numbers speak for themselves. For comparisons sake, I also threw in the results for the AMD 550 GPU. That graphics card is one of the cheapest currently available right now, with an MSRP of $80 and a street value of more than $160.

Those numbers are great, but something like Rise of the Tomb Raider, which is a AAA game with extremely taxing graphics, isn’t exactly what integrated GPUs are meant for. If you want to play the fanciest games available than you’ll need a fancy graphics card. Integrated graphics are intended for the games you want to play a quick round of after dinner—hugely popular but not taxing titles like Gwent or Hearthstone or Overwatch. Because I really wanted to see how the graphics hold up with more popular games I also opted to test the popular shooter Overwatch. As with Civ VI and Rise of the Tomb Raider it was tested at a resolution of 4K. And again it trumped the best Intel integrated GPU you can get right now, with both the Ryzen 5 and 3 being twice as fast as the Intel Iris 630 that’s integrated with the i7-8700K.

Unfortunately none of the results were actually good at 4K. Even on the lowest settings the Vega GPU in AMD’s APUs only managed an average 20 frames per second, which is absolutely unplayable. But when I dropped the resolution to 1080 things improved significantly. On the lowest graphics setting the AMD APUs managed an average 66fps—which is more than enough for most players and almost twice as fast at the 33fps of the Intel CPU. And on the Ultra it still managed a perfectly acceptable 35 frames per second versus the Intel’s unplayable 17fps. That means you could build an Overwatch ready computer with something as cheap as the $100 Ryzen 3 2200G. No need for one of the sky-high priced graphics cards out there.

That’s a big deal. Intel has been promising gaming-worthy integrated graphics for the last few years, but it’s been unable to deliver. Trying to play Overwatch on a desktop sans discrete GPU, or trying to play on a laptop, is an exercise in frustration. AMD’s new Ryzen APUs actually make gaming without a graphics card possible—and pleasant! The experience is even similar to if you had a card plugged into the PCI slot sucking up power. You still have to install AMD drivers just as you would with discrete graphics you get the same tweaks to gaming performance as you would with a discrete card.

In fact the only issue I’ve run into so far with these APUs is that they currently do not play very nicely with discrete graphics cards from AMD’s rival Nvidia. Originally I’d hoped to give a detailed look at how the Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G performed against their competitors on benchmarks like Geekbench 4, WebXPRT 2015, and Gizmodo’s Photoshop test. However all CPUs we’ve previously tested were benchmarked with an Nvidia 1080 GPU installed. When I tried to get that same CPU working with the Ryzen APUs I ran into some pretty annoying errors related to the AMD and Nvidia drivers not playing well together. AMD is still investigating the issue, and I’ll update here should the situation be resolved.

But I find myself reluctant to ding these Ryzen APUs too much for this driver issue. Because these APUs aren’t necessarily the processors someone would, or should, buy when building your next big gaming rig. Instead these super cheaps CPUs are what you buy when you’re building your first PC or slowly building up a new PC out of spare parts. You spend $100 on a CPU one month. Then $50 on the motherboard the next. Before you know it you’re building a fast enough computer for a few hundred bucks and playing Overwatch with you friends. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to build a PC but have been put off by the potential price then the $170 Ryzen 5 2400G and $100 Ryzen 3 2200G are the processors for you. These things are so good you can put off worrying about what kind of graphics card to buy until the prices drop.

README

  • These processors are cheap and between $70 and $85 cheaper than their competitors.
  • If you’re looking to game at reasonable graphics settings in 1080p than these processors are perfect and give you nearly identical performance.
  • People looking for 4K gaming should not be idiots, and still plan to invest in a discrete graphics card.
  • We found driver issues occurred when trying to use a Nvidia card with the AMD APUs, but you own mileage may vary.

Tech

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

February 12, 2018 at 08:06AM

North Korea’s Weapons of Mass Distraction

North Korea’s Weapons of Mass Distraction

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GANGNEUNG, South Korea—The diplomatic efforts between the two Koreas at the Pyeongchang Olympics so far have included a visit from Kim Jong Un’s sister, bilateral meetings, and the decision to field a single squad of athletes under the flag of a unified Korea.

Those instruments of statecraft, however, were conspicuously lacking in choreographed chants and speedy wardrobe changes. For that, North Korea has fallen back on its favorite weapon of mass distraction: cheerleader diplomacy.

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via WSJ.com: What’s News US http://online.wsj.com

February 12, 2018 at 08:27AM

Purdue Pharma says it will stop promoting opioids to doctors

Purdue Pharma says it will stop promoting opioids to doctors

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More than a decade after Purdue Pharma was first criticized by the federal government for its “aggressive” marketing of the addictive painkiller OxyContin, the company says it will stop promoting the opioid to doctors.

The company told CNN on Sunday that it has cut its sales force in half to 200 representatives and will turn its focus to marketing non-opioid drugs. The news was reported earlier by Bloomberg.

Purdue will continue to sell OxyContin, but sales reps will no longer visit doctors’ offices to promote the drug.

For the past couple of years Purdue has routinely directed doctors to the CDC’s “Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain,” the company said.

Related: Walmart is giving away free opioid disposal kits

Opioids, a class of pharmaceuticals that include prescription pain killers like OxyContin as well as illicit drugs like heroin and fentanyl, are at the root of an ongoing public health crisis in America.

In 2016, there were 42,249 opioid-linked drug fatalities in the U.S. — more than the number of deaths linked to breast cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The opioid crisis has raised significant concern about prescription painkillers. Between 1999 and 2009, overdoses from such drugs rose about 13% annually, though the increase has since slowed to 3% per year.

Sales of OxyContin, which is a long-acting version of the drug oxycodone that was designed to deliver medicine over 12 hours, grew rapidly after it hit the market in 1996.

Related: Opioids now kill more people than breast cancer

Reports about OxyContin abuse began to surface by early 2000, according to a 2003 government report.

The Drug Enforcement Administration “expressed concern that Purdue’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin focused on promoting the drug to treat a wide range of conditions to physicians who may not have been adequately trained in pain management,” the report states.

Purdue collaborated with the Food and Drug Administration on a “risk management plan” aimed at preventing abuse of the drug, according to the report.

Then, in 2007, the federal government brought criminal charges against Purdue for misleadingly advertising OxyContin as less addictive than other opioids. Purdue and three executives pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $634.5 million in civil and criminal fines.

Purdue says it has since been involved in various measures to curb opioid addiction. In 2010, the firm released a new version of OxyContin that is more difficult to crush — and therefore more difficult to abuse by snorting or injecting it.

— Nadia Kounang and Sonia Moghe contributed to this report.

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February 11, 2018 at 06:38PM