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Top headlines:
Lead story:
This weekend, Chicago will be hosting the NASCAR Grant Park 220 – the first street race in a U.S. city in 60 years.
As someone who admittedly has never watched a NASCAR race, I always viewed driving as a sport of precision, strategy and hand-eye coordination – which it is. But I had no idea about the physical toll racing took on drivers.
Michael Reid, a physiologist at the University of Florida, has been studying how race car driving puts immense stress on the body’s muscles and heart. He and his team have discovered that the metabolic demands are the same as playing basketball – and that’s without taking into account the layers of protective equipment drivers must wear. He takes readers inside the steaming cockpit of a stock car, where drivers compete “in what’s essentially a moving oven.”
City races like the one in Chicago this weekend can be especially brutal on the body, especially when they’re held in the dog days of summer. “Compared to oval tracks, heart rates are higher on road courses and street races,” he writes, due to “the extra work required for hard braking and sharp turns.”
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Race car drivers compete in full-body safety gear while sitting in a piping hot car, which puts tremendous strain on the heart.
Grant Halverson/Getty Images for NASCAR
Michael Reid, University of Florida
Imagine an NBA game played outdoors in August, with no substitutions and players wearing snowsuits, gloves and ski masks. Race car drivers routinely compete under similar conditions.
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Environment + Energy
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Alun Hubbard, University of Tromsø
Glaciologists are discovering new ways surface meltwater alters the internal structure of ice sheets, and raising an alarm that sea level rise could be much more abrupt than current models forecast.
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Lee D. Han, University of Tennessee
When a major roadway or bridge needs fixing, all that traffic has to go somewhere.
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Health + Medicine
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Rodney E. Rohde, Texas State University
An aggressive, antifungal-resistant form of tinea, a contagious ringworm fungal infection, has appeared in the US, likely driven by overuse and misuse of antifungal medications.
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Science + Technology
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Anne Toomey McKenna, University of Richmond
The government faces legal restrictions on how much personal information it can gather on citizens, but the law is largely silent on agencies purchasing the data from commercial brokers.
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Yakov Pichkar, Vanderbilt University; Nicole Creanza, Vanderbilt University
People with a common history – often due to significant geographic or social barriers – often share genetics and language. New research finds that even a dialect can act as a barrier within a group.
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Politics + Society
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Gibbs Knotts, College of Charleston; Vince Benigni, College of Charleston
Debates have played an important part in the American political process. And when candidates don’t participate, democracy suffers.
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Alauna Safarpour, Northeastern University
On the 160th anniversary of the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg, a political scientist finds that residents of formerly Confederate states express greater support for political violence than others.
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Ethics + Religion
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Ken Chitwood, University of Southern California
Muslims throughout the world will celebrate the holiday of Eid al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice) beginning this Friday evening. Here’s an introduction to this important feast.
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