The Olympics is the world’s greatest athletic event. Men and women run, swim, dive, lift, vault, serve, swing, kick and play against one another until a champion is crowned, in sport after sport. But what separates each champion from his or her competitors, who are all elite athletes themselves? To answer that and many other [...]

In the 1960s, the legendary psychologist Albert Bandura rejected the view that learning is passive. Instead he emphasized the importance of the active use of learning strategies. Today, Bandura’s legacy lives on, and has been extended in exciting new directions. Grounded in Bandura’s pioneering research, in 1986 Barry Zimmerman and Martinez Pons published a paper that [...]

Surprisingly little evolutionarily informed research has been done on our species’ strange love affair with sports. Why do we care so much about such arbitrary and ostensibly functionless displays of physical and mental prowess? Although data derived directly from evolutionary hypotheses are scant, theories abound. In a recent issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine [...]

The Brazilian three-banded armadillo (Tolypeutes tricinctus) can roll itself into a ball so tight that only a puma’s claws can penetrate its protective shell. But this evolutionary advantage hasn’t done much to protect the species from humans, who have turned savannah habitats into inhospitable cattle ranches and soybean plantations. Once found throughout Brazil, the armadillos—one [...]

Helmets protect your head—but they can’t fully protect your brain. This helps to explain why football players continue to incur brain trauma that may lead to debilitating brain disease. Recently, a team of researchers presented more evidence of the devastating progression of a brain disease caused by repeated brain trauma. On December 2, researchers from [...]

The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) college football rankings are in turmoil. For two weeks in a row, the top-ranked team has been upset by an underdog from central Texas. (Full disclosure: As a Baylor alum who is the daughter and granddaughter of Aggies, I might be just a little smug.) The BCS rankings are a [...]

“It’s a great rarity today for someone to achieve athletic success who doesn’t take drugs.” That quote seems rather timely, in the wake of the news that cyclist Lance Armstrong will no longer fight the accusations of doping leveled at him by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. The charges may cost Armstrong all seven of his [...]

As the summer winds down and Labor Day weekend approaches in the U.S., beaches and public pools will be filling up with swimmers looking to take one last dip outdoors before the season ends. Most people will hit the water without worrying about the microscopic organisms they’ll be swimming with. Maybe that’s for the best, [...]

R. A. Dickey is one of the hottest topics in Major League Baseball right now. This right-handed Mets pitcher’s two most recent outings have been one-hitters, he has a league-leading 11–1 win-loss record, and he’s one of the league’s only knuckleballers. What makes this pitch so hard to hit? A knuckleball is famously difficult to [...]

I originally published versions of this post at IonPsych on 3/9/11 and at my WordPress blog on 3/11/12. You can see the original posts by clicking here for the 2011 post, or by clicking the From The Archives icon for the 2012 post. This is the first post in a March Madness series that I [...]

March Madness always sneaks up on me. I mean, I know that March has started because my dad’s birthday and my wedding anniversary are right at the beginning of the month, but I always end up scrambling to make my NCAA basketball tournament picks the day before games start. Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg has taken the [...]

Practice makes progress, if not perfection, for most things in life. Generally, practicing a skill—be it basketball, chess or the tuba—mostly makes you better at whatever it was you practiced. Even related areas do not benefit much. Doing intensive basketball drills does not usually make a person particularly good at football. Chess experts are not [...]

One of the hardest aspects of school for young children is in some ways the simplest: sitting still. Recess is the time worn antidote to such restlessness. But regular physical exercise is also generally important to academic performance—and not just for young students. It can help boost various types of cognition in kids into the [...]