The rugby union line-out is a key aspect of game play and involves players from both teams contesting for the ball after it has been thrown in from the side line. Successful lines-out throws require the ball to be delivered accurately to the hands of a jumping and/or lifted team mate (approximately 3-3.5 m off the ground) over distances of between 5- 18 m. Previous research has suggested consid...

The purpose of this study was to determine the optimum release conditions for the free throw in men's basketball. The study used hundreds of thousands of three-dimensional simulations of basketball trajectories. Five release variables were studied: release height, release speed, launch angle, side angle, and back spin. The free throw shooter was assumed to shoot at 70% and to release the ball 2...

Background: Disc golf is a sport played much like traditional golf, but rather than using a ball and club, players throw flying discs with various throwing motions. It has been played by an estimated 8 to 12 million people in the United States. Like all sports, injuries sustained while playing disc golf are not uncommon. Although formalized in the 1970s, it has grown at a rapid pace; however, d...

Previous studies have indicated that timing of finger opening in an overarm throw is likely controlled centrally, possibly by means of an internal model of hand trajectory. The present objective was to extend the study of throwing to an examination of the dynamics of finger opening. Throwing a heavy ball and throwing a light ball presumably require different neural commands, because the weight ...

We studied coordination across body parts in throwing during adaptation to prisms. Human subjects threw balls at a target before, during, and after wearing laterally shifting prism eyeglasses. Positions of head, shoulders, arm, and ball were video-recorded continuously. We computed body angles of eyes-in-head, head-on-trunk, trunk-on-arm, and arm-on-ball. In each subject, the gaze-throw adjustm...

In two dimensions, we accurately predicted the trajectory of a basketball using approximately ten images each taken less taken less than three tenths of a second after a shooter a free throw. Our trajectory predictions were made using automatically stabilized handheld video footage of a shooter releasing a free throw. Although we used only the first few images of the shooter releasing the baske...

1. Introduction In order to learn a new word, children first need to determine what form class the word belongs to, and find an appropriate referent in the situation in which the word is introduced. They then must determine what other instances the word should be (or should not be) generalized to. In doing so, children need to realize that generalization of words are governed by different princ...

We investigated the ability of cerebellar patients and unskilled subjects to control finger grip position and the amplitude of finger opening during a multijoint overarm throw. This situation is of interest because the appropriate finger control requires predicting the magnitude of back forces from the ball on the finger throughout the throw and generating the appropriate level and rate of chan...

Using a simplistic model of juggling based on physics, a natural map is constructed from the set of periodic juggling patterns (or site swaps) to links. We then show that all topological links can be juggled. 1. Juggling sequences The art of juggling has been around for thousands of years. Over the past quarter of a century, the interplay between juggling and mathematics has been well studied. ...