Tag: Sports

Billion Dollar Baseball Teams

The remarkable valuation was apparently placed on the Red Sox — and their cable arm, New England Sports Network — in a transaction earlier this year.

A $9.1 million profit on a $5 million purchase implies a $14.1 million sale. The shares sold amounted to 1.2% of the Sox. By that math, the total value of the club would be $1.2 billion.

The Yankees will surely be worth even more than this if George Steinbrenner’s heirs decide to sell. Forbes magazine puts the value of the Yankees at $1.6 billion. Click on the link below to see how they came up with these numbers.

via How the Red Sox beat the Yankees to a billion Brett Arends’ ROI – MarketWatch.

Tiger Woods – Adrenaline Junkie Control Freak

During a trip to New Zealand for his caddie’s wedding, Woods went bungee jumping off a cable car suspended 440 feet over a river valley. On the same trip, he climbed behind the wheel of a race car and traded paint with the competition on a dirt track.

Woods spent a week at Fort Bragg going through Special Forces training with the Marines and became a master scuba diver, capable of holding his breath for four minutes at a time while exploring the ocean. He could stay on the ocean floor even longer, Woods explained, when he used a regulator. But the scenery was so much better without one.

“You don’t want any bubbles because that scares the fish off,” he said. “The only problem is that when you don’t make any bubbles, the sharks come around, too.”

via Tiger Woods – Salon.com.

Sports Gene Found?

A difference in just one amino acid in a protein might explain why some people learn new motor skills faster and reach higher levels of performance.

The protein, called brain-derived neurotro­phic factor (BDNF), is a key driver of synaptic plasti­city, the ability of the connections between brain cells to change in strength. This plasticity is an important factor in learning, explains neurologist Janine Reis, who led the study at the National Institutes of Health. According to Reis, this finding offers the first evidence that slight variations in BDNF’s structure affect learning ability.

Other groups have found that the BDNF version that Reis linked with poorer acquisition of skills is associated with reduced function of the hippocampus, a brain region involved in motor learning.

via Athletic Ability May Lie in a Single Gene: Scientific American.