Latest news with #Injuries
Irish Times
17 hours ago
- Sport
- Irish Times
Leinster monitoring Lions quartet ahead of URC final
Leinster will continue to monitor the injuries of Josh van der Flier , Garry Ringrose , Hugo Keenan and Tadhg Furlong ahead of this Saturday's URC final against the Bulls at Croke Park (kick-off 5pm). The province confirmed Ringrose, Keenan and Furlong are all carrying calf injuries, while van der Flier is managing a hamstring injury, causing them to sit out last weekend's semi-final win over Glasgow Warriors at the Aviva Stadium. They will be assessed further over the coming days and a final decision will be made later this week on their availability for Saturday's final. The four are part of the British & Irish Lions squad set to get their summer Tour under way against Argentina in Dublin on June 20th. READ MORE Leinster also confirmed Tommy O'Brien, who featured in the win over Glasgow, and Jordan Larmour, who was part of the extended matchday squad, are both available for selection. No further updates were given on Caelan Doris, Robbie Henshaw, Brian Deeny or Will Connors.
The Hindu
5 days ago
- Health
- The Hindu
Exposomics for better environmental health
The focus for World Environment Day in 2025 (June 5) is on ending plastic pollution. Micro-plastics represent one of the many thousands of chemical, physical and biological hazards that lurk in the air, water and living spaces for which we have neither the sensory capabilities nor sensing technologies to measure exposure and assess health risks. Thus, reducing the environmental disease burden continues to be a daunting challenge for public health. In India, rapid economic growth is increasing the scale and the complexity of environmental exposures and the interdependencies between the living environment and lifestyles. With India already accounting for nearly 25% of the global environmental disease burden, there is a need to develop newer paradigms for environmental management that rest on integrated health risk assessments. These must include all environmental factors into the study of disease development. The piece-meal approaches that define our current framing on environment or health indicators are likely to exaggerate environmental health inequities and result in spiralling health costs. We must embrace new and cutting-edge scientific developments in the field of 'exposomics' to gain a more complete picture of disease etiologies over the life course and develop holistic prevention strategies. Strategic investments in long-term environmental health surveillance that integrate novel environmental and biomonitoring efforts with digital health and data science platforms are critical. Environmental disease burden The World Health Organization (WHO) began estimating the environmental disease burden in 2000, which is the basis for the modern estimation approach being adopted in the Global Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factor (GBD) study. Each cycle of the GBD identifies risk factors with the greatest attributable health burden. In the latest cycle (2021) that included 88 risk factors, environmental and occupational (OEH) risk factors in the GBD were responsible for 18.9% (12.8 million) of global deaths and 14.4% of all disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), led by ambient PM 2.5 air pollution (4.2% DALYs, 4.7 million deaths) and household air pollution from the use of solid fuels for cooking (3.9% DALYs, 3.1 million deaths). In India, nearly three million deaths and 100 million deaths are attributable to occupational and environmental health (OEH) risks. OEH risk factors in India are also estimated to account for more than 50% of the attributable burden for non-communicable diseases including ischemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive lung disease, lung cancer, asthma and, more recently, diabetes and chronic kidney disease. Risk factors such as lead exposures can have grave developmental health impacts for children under five, with India accounting for up to 154 million or 20% of the total estimated IQ points lost globally in children under five. What are we missing? The GBD results provide a strong and robust body of evidence to initiate actions for cleaner air, safer water and better sanitation. However, the current environmental burden of disease addresses only a limited number (around 11) of categories of environmental risk factors as there is a paucity of human exposure data. Several environmental risk factors that can contribute to significant health burdens are currently not included in the GBD. These include various chemical exposures, risks from complex mixtures such as micro-plastics and solid waste and physical hazards such as environmental noise. More importantly, environmental risk factors interact in complex ways with metabolic (high blood pressure or high fasting plasma glucose) and behavioural risk factors (smoking and unhealthy diets) as well as underlying genetic susceptibility and upstream health determinants (such as socio-economic status) to produce a health impact within populations. Risk estimates are often derived for single risk factors; while confounding is often well adjusted in long-term cohort studies, complex mixtures and interactions over a life course have not been adequately explored. Finally, climate change can magnify hazards posed by multiple environmental risk factors, such as heat, air pollution, vector-borne diseases, storms and flooding, and wildfires. Climate change may reduce crop yields, reduce agricultural worker productivity, disrupt food security and affect food supply chains. Depression, anxiety and other mental health outcomes, driven by both ecological concerns and direct health impacts of climate-sensitive environmental risk factors such as fine particulate matter, are also important to consider. Several of these risk factors can occur together, resulting in compound events and synergistic effects. These hazards can further amplify health impacts among populations with inadequate access to health systems or healthy food systems. Methods and data are not yet available to support inclusion of these important risk factors in the global burden of disease assessments. Thus, the current environmental burden of disease estimates are not only a conservative underestimates but also do not provide an adequate means of prioritising against competing risk factors to develop holistic, scalable preventive health strategies. The human exposome The global human genome project (1990-2003) revolutionised our ability to explore the genetic origins of disease. However, it also revealed the limited predictive power of individual genetic variation for many common diseases. Genetic factors for example, contribute to less than half of the risk of heart disease, which is a leading source of mortality. The success in mapping the human genome has fostered the complementary concept of the 'exposome'. The exposome is defined as the measure of all the exposures of an individual in a lifetime and how those exposures relate to health. Traditional environmental health studies include hypothesis-driven methods which have focused on one or a class of environmental exposures at a few time points. These fail to account for the complex interactions of exposures across the lifespan, on human health. Exposomics aims to bridge this gap by understanding how external exposures from physical, chemical, biological and psycho-social environments interact with diet and lifestyle and internal individual characteristics such as genetics, physiology, and epigenetics to create health or disease. This would allow the generation of an atlas of exposure wide associations (EWAS) to complement genome-wide associations (GWAS) and enable discovery-based analysis of environmental influences on health. The exposome requires synchronisation of several inter-disciplinary technologies which include real time sensor based personal exposure monitoring with wearables; untargeted chemical analyses on human biomonitoring samples; testing on human-relevant micro-physiological systems (also known as organs-on-a-chip) wherein in vitro models replicate the structure and function of human organs or tissues to understand the mechanistic basis of biological response; and big data, and artificial intelligence (AI) to mine data and generate integrated pieces of evidence. Given that capacities and resources to generate exposomics data are not widely available, an immediate need for the exposomic framework to become a reality is also the creation of a data ecosystem in which harmonised data can be found, accessed, and shared through sustained and interoperable data repositories. Mainstream environment within health Exposome frameworks may seem implausible or irrelevant in India where the implementation of environmental health management programmes faces numerous hurdles. But, leapfrogging to technology and data-driven approaches is not new to the health sector. Exposomics offers unprecedented potential to mainstream environmental risks within public health programmes by generating more accurate predictive models for many chronic diseases while also enabling precision medicine. Unbridled investments in capacity building and synchronising available analytical, environmental and public health infrastructure offer the promise of addressing the concerns of our populations with unprecedented cost-effectiveness. The time is ripe for the Indian environmental health community to engage and contribute to the global momentum on the science of exposomics. Future celebrations of World Environment Day may soon focus on why the human exposome project can be the best prescription for holistic prevention efforts that preserve and promote health equity. Dr. Kalpana Balakrishnan is Dean (Research), Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research (SRIHER), Chennai
Wall Street Journal
02-06-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
He's the Most Important Player in the NBA Finals—and He Doesn't Play for Either Team
It's hard for a great NBA player to have a worse season than Paul George had this year. The Philadelphia 76ers' forward, a nine-time All-Star, saw his scoring average plummet and sat out the last month of the season through injuries. The Sixers sank to the lower reaches of the conference standings.
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Russians attack Kharkiv Oblast with guided aerial bombs, injuring three people
The Russian army attacked Kharkiv Oblast with guided aerial bombs (GABs) on the morning of 31 May, injuring three people. Source: Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration Details: The Russians hit the premises of a civilian business with a GAB in the village of Vasyshcheve, damaging buildings. Two people were injured. A house was damaged in Bezliudivka and a person was injured as a result of the Russian attack. Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
New York Times
30-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Battle of the $100 million rotations: How the Dodgers' and Yankees' starters stack up
This weekend's series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees will feature two of the three most expensive rotations in baseball — not two of the best, but maybe two of the most interesting. After huge investments from both teams, there's been a reversal of fortunes this year between the Dodgers and Yankees, at least when it comes to starting rotations. As the season started, the Dodgers were supposed to have the best rotation in baseball, with the Yankees about average, as this projections-fueled depth chart from the end of March shows. Now, whatever stat you use, the Yankees are a back-end top-10 rotation, and the Dodgers are scuffling below average. Advertisement How much longer that continues depends on some expensive injured Dodgers arms, to some extent. But a deeper analysis of how these rotations were built might give us a better insight into how this happened, and how they might fare going forward. These rotations have a lot in common, and the small differences might mean the world. The obvious similarity between the two is that these are high-dollar rotations. This is an approximation using the data available on RosterResource's payroll pages, and they include money allocated to pitchers who aren't pitching, so they aren't exact numbers. But the Dodgers and Yankees spend, and their rotations are largely built on top-end free agents and backed by cheap internally developed options. Both teams have had great, expensive pitchers on the injured list for most of the season. The Yankees have gotten zero innings from Gerrit Cole, and the Dodgers have gotten a combined 27 innings from Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow. That's around $100 million of salary if they lost all three for the full season — a difference here is the Yankees won't get Cole back this year, and the Dodgers are still hopeful they will get their duo back and erase some of the ground standing between these two rotations. At least Glasnow is throwing again. How much these teams lean into injury risk when they spend on their top pitchers is debatable. There are ways to model injury risk, and Jeff Zimmerman has done so using velocity, playing time, overall injuries and arm injuries, and Cole (25th percentile), Glasnow (12th percentile), and Snell (45th percentile) were all iffy bets for full seasons going into this season — but that's unfair to the Yankees, who signed Cole a long time ago, when his injury risk was a lot lower. But Carlos Rodón (12th percentile) and Max Fried (43rd percentile) were more recent signings, and not necessarily the pictures of health throughout their careers, as they've both had major arm injuries before signing their big deals. Seems like both of these teams are willing to take on some injury risk in their free agents, perhaps because they believe in their ability to develop internal options to replace those veterans when something breaks. That has been a large part of the story in New York this year, where Clarke Schmidt and Will Warren have given this team an all-important 88 innings of competent pitching. Surprisingly, their 4.30 ERA, built on excellent strikeout numbers (28 percent, 23 percent is average), is an almost exact match for the Dodgers' group of up-and-down starters, who have a 4.29 ERA on the season, albeit with a league-average strikeout rate. Advertisement It's still worth giving the Yankees kudos for developing these two young starters internally and maybe giving more of an incomplete to the Dodgers on the same front. If Landon Knack and Ben Casparius emerge from these next couple of weeks as dependable rotation arms, they would be a better match for what has been happening in New York. Might happen, but Casparius' command and Knack's meh fastball are impediments. That said, these teams have something in common with the way they like to work with pitchers. First, they were among the first teams to develop sweepers, the sideways slider that is still an important part of the pitching landscape. The Yankees have the most sideways movement on their sweepers in baseball, with the Dodgers landing second. Warren and Fried are in the top 10 among starters in sweep, and the fact that the lefty is there is notable, because it's among the many things the Yankees tweaked with their new ace. Remarkably, a pitcher with such a distinguished track record came to the Bronx, and they still managed to: • Add 2 inches of sweep to the sweeper • Double the usage of the sweeper • Add over 3 inches of sink to the sinker • Add velo and drop to his vaunted curveball • Add drop to the changeup With Rodón, they were able to do much of the same: develop a sinker, improve the changeup and bump his usage of both. And even though Ryan Yarbrough doesn't throw hard, they've managed to give him 4 inches more drop on the changeup, 2 inches more ride on the four-seamer and an inch more cut on the cutter. I think the #Yankees made a subtle orientation tweak to Ryan Yarbrough's changeup… 2024: 2.4" vertical break, 16" arm-side2025: -2.2" vertical break, 18" arm-side Swinging-strike rate up from 13% to 20% vs RHH. Doubled early count cutter usage vs RHH too. Pitch Lab cookin' — Lance Brozdowski (@LanceBroz) May 27, 2025 Over in L.A., Glasnow has added a sinker, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto has upped his sinker usage and improved his cutter while there. They've had success in the past, tweaking arsenals with players like Jack Flaherty, Andrew Heaney and Tyler Anderson. Dodgers starters have leveraged the splitter more (second in baseball), but the Yankees use the sinker about 50 percent more often than the Dodgers — there are some differences, but they each push the needle forward. Advertisement These league powerhouses are good at harnessing the power of the seams for movement, as evidenced by their pitch usage and major-league coaching. What does the next wave look like for each team, considering they are both already relying on in-house options, and any further injury would force them to reach deeper into their bags? The Yankees may have taken a bit of a lead in pitch development overall, as seen by this possible advantage in the big leagues as well as what's happening in the minors. An aggressive investment in starting pitching in the draft has led to a bevy of well-regarded pitching prospects like Ben Hess (No. 3 Yankees prospect, according to The Athletic's Keith Law), Cam Schlittler (No. 8) and Bryce Cunningham (No. 10), and Schlittler is even at Double-A, perhaps close to ready in case of need. They use the same approach — using seam effects to expand arsenals — which has shown success in the major leagues. Cam Schlittler (@Yankees No. 10 prospect) collected six strikeouts in his eighth start of the season. Schlittler's 58 strikeouts on the season are tied for the most of any Yankees minor league pitcher. — Somerset Patriots (@SOMPatriots) May 27, 2025 The Dodgers, on the other hand, seem to focus on velocity over most else. They were first in fastball velocity from Single A to Triple A, and also first in slider velocity in that same sample, according to Lance Brozdowski, player development analyst for Marquee Sports Network. They were also worst in fastball zone rate, suggesting fastball command isn't an emphasis for them. ''Hit it far and we'll put it on the fairway,' was the metaphor I heard regarding the Dodgers,' Brozdowski said, and maybe Casparius is an example. After getting poor command grades from scouts, he slowly ramped up his fastball and slider velocity through his minor-league career and is now sporting a 30 percent strikeout rate in his young career — paired with some of the best walk rates he's shown. Their rotation has the 27th-best location numbers, so maybe the approach has hurt them, but they've got veterans in that rotation as well. This weekend will show off some of the Yankees' vaunted pitching coaching. Fried's new sinker, Warren's huge sweeper and Yarbrough's changeup will speak volumes to their ability to identify possible improvements and develop pitching. The Dodgers will return serve with internal success stories based mostly on changeups and splitters in Tony Gonsolin, Knack and Yamamoto. Give the Yankees a slight arm advantage in this weekend's series as things stand today. Time may soften some of the perceived advantages we see in the differences between these two organizations. Should Casparius and Knack (or one of their other young starters) pitch well in the next few weeks, they'll point to the advantages in the Dodger's development philosophy, and should one of the currently healthy Yankees free agents get hurt, they'll point to the inherent risk in signing any free-agent starter. The injured Dodgers could get back up and make good on projections that still have Los Angeles second in baseball going forward. These two rotations could still end up near each other in 2025's final reckoning. A closer finish would be appropriate. Because of their philosophies in building through free agency, improving pitch mixes for veterans and youngsters alike and building injury replacements internally by leveraging things like seam effects and slider velocity, they have a lot in common. (Photo of Yoshinobu Yamamoto: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)
