Baseball's Winning Formula: Statistical analysis used to debunk the old adage 'pitching is 75 percent of game

1:17 p.m., Oct. 3, 2011--Baseball legend Connie Mack famously said pitching is 75 percent of the game.  He was wrong – a new analysis by a University of Delaware professor finds it’s just 25 percent.

This month, the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports will feature the article "An Estimate of How Hitting, Pitching, Fielding, and Base-stealing Impact Team Winning Percentages in Baseball."  In it, University of Delaware Prof. Charles Pavitt of the Department of Communication defines the perfect “formula” for Major League Baseball (MLB) teams to use to build the ultimate winning team.

New energy in search for future wind

Some recent international studies have shown a decrease in wind speeds in several parts of the globe, including across Australia. However, more recent results by CSIRO show that Australia's average wind speed is actually increasing.

Scientists at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research have analysed wind speed observations to understand the causes of variations in near-surface wind and explore long-term wind speed trends over Australia.

Tasmanian Tiger’s Jaw Was Too Small to Attack Sheep, Study Shows

The Tasmanian Tiger with it's
trademark striped back went extinct in the 1930's.

Australia's iconic thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, was hunted to death in the early Twentieth century for allegedly killing sheep; however, a new study published in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal of Zoology has found that the tiger had such weak jaws that its prey was probably no larger than a possum.

"Our research has shown that its rather feeble jaw restricted it to catching smaller, more agile prey," said lead author Marie Attard, of the University of New South Wales Computational Biomechanics Research Group. "That's an unusual trait for a large predator like that, considering its substantial 30 kg body mass and carnivorous diet. As for its supposed ability to take prey as large as sheep, our findings suggest that its reputation was at best overblown.

"While there is still much debate about its diet and feeding behaviour, this new insight suggests that its inability to kill large prey may have hastened it on the road to extinction."

Thylacines were top predators that once ranged across Australia and New Guinea but were found only in Tasmania by the time of European settlement. The resulting loss of habitat and prey, and a bounty paid to hunters to kill them, have been blamed for the demise of this carnivorous marsupial.

Despite its obvious decline, it did not receive official protection from the Tasmanian Government until two months before the last known individual died at Hobart Zoo on 7th September, 1936.

Using advanced computer modelling techniques, the UNSW research team were able to simulate various predatory behaviours, including biting, tearing and pulling, to predict patterns of stress in the skull of a thylacine and those of Australasia’s two largest remaining marsupial carnivores, the Tasmanian devil and the spotted-tailed quoll.

The thylacine's skull was highly stressed compared to those of its close living relatives in response to simulations of struggling prey and bites using their jaw muscles.

“By comparing the skull performance of the extinct thylacine with those of closely related, living species we can predict the likely body size of its prey," says the director of the Computational Biomechanics Research Group, Dr Stephen Wroe. "We can be pretty sure that thylacines were competing with other marsupial carnivores to prey on smaller mammals, such as bandicoots, wallabies and possums.

“Especially among large predators, the more specialised a species becomes the more vulnerable is it to extinction. Just a small disturbance to the ecosystem, such as those resulting from the way European settlers altered the land, may have been enough to tip this delicately poised species over the edge."

This story was a press release from wiley.com.

Deep oceans can mask global warming for decade-long periods

Sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean.  (Photo by Carlye Calvin)

BOULDER -- The planet’s deep oceans at times may absorb enough heat to flatten the rate of global warming for periods of as long as a decade even in the midst of longer-term warming, according to a new analysis led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

The study, based on computer simulations of global climate, points to ocean layers deeper than 1,000 feet (300 meters) as the main location of the “missing heat” during periods such as the past decade when global air temperatures showed little trend. The findings also suggest that several more intervals like this can be expected over the next century, even as the trend toward overall warming continues.

“We will see global warming go through hiatus periods in the future,” says NCAR’s Gerald Meehl, lead author of the study. “However, these periods would likely last only about a decade or so, and warming would then resume. This study illustrates one reason why global temperatures do not simply rise in a straight line.”

Water Evaporated From Trees Cools Global Climate-with 2 VIDEOS

(Photo by Snezana Trifunovic-wikipedia-Creative Commons)

Washington, DC — Scientists have long debated about the impact on global climate of water evaporated from vegetation. New research from Carnegie’s Global Ecology department concludes that evaporated water helps cool the earth as a whole, not just the local area of evaporation, demonstrating that evaporation of water from trees and lakes could have a cooling effect on the entire atmosphere. These findings, published September 14 in Environmental Research Letters, have major implications for land-use decision making.

Endangered horse has ancient origins and high genetic diversity

Kateryna Makova, associate professor of biology at Penn State, led a team
that studied DNA from the endangered Przewalski's horse.  The research
could be used to aid conservation efforts to save the species, of which
only 2,000 individuals remain worldwide. (Photo by Penn State)

An endangered species of horse -- known as Przewalski's horse -- is much more distantly related to the domestic horse than researchers had previously hypothesized, reports a team of investigators led by Kateryna Makova, associate professor of biology at Penn State. The scientists tested the portion of the genome passed exclusively from mother to offspring -- the mitochondrial DNA -- of four Przewalski's horse lineages and compared the data to DNA from the domestic horse (Equus caballus).

They concluded that, although previous scientists had assumed that Przewalski's horse and the domestic horse had diverged around the time that horses were domesticated -- about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago -- the real time of the two species' divergence from one another is much more ancient. The data gleaned from the study also suggest that present-day Przewalski's horses have a much more diverse gene pool than previously hypothesized. The new study's findings could be used to inform conservation efforts to save the endangered horse species, of which only 2,000 individuals remain in wildlife reserves in Europe and Asia and in the zoos.

The paper will be published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution on a date that has not yet been determined. An early online version of the paper, titled "A Massively Parallel Sequencing Approach Uncovers Ancient Origins and High Genetic Variability of Endangered Przewalski's Horses," is on the journal's website at http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/recent.

Study Links Drinking Pattern to Alcohol’s Effect on Heart Health-WITH VIDEO

For the first time, new research shows that patterns of alcohol consumption – a drink or two every night, or several cocktails on Friday and Saturday nights only – may be more important in determining alcohol’s influence on heart health than the total amount consumed.

In the journal Atherosclerosis, scientists found that daily moderate drinking – the equivalent of two drinks per day, seven days a week – decreased atherosclerosis in mice, while binge drinking – the equivalent of seven drinks a day, two days a week – increased development of the disease. Atherosclerosis, or the hardening and narrowing of arteries, is a serious condition that can lead to a heart attack or stroke.

While population studies support an association between alcohol and cardiovascular disease, they’ve relied on self-reported data, which is not always accurate or reliable. According to study authors, this is the first study to provide concrete evidence linking drinking patterns to the development of vascular disease, and the nearly 15 percent of Americans who binge drink – as estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – should take note.