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For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology 24 August 2013 | NewScientist | 21 Basketball sleeve helps you make the perfect shot THINK you’ve got game? Try this on for size: a sensor-laden sleeve promises to improve basketball players’ shooting skills by tracking their arm movements and calculating the arc of their shots. The sleeve is equipped with accelerometers that sit over the player’s biceps, forearm and back of the hand. As they practise, the sleeve keeps track of every arm movement and compares it with an ideal model of arm motion for a basketball shot. It can either provide feedback through a series of light and sound cues from the sleeve’s sensors, or run in silent mode so the player can focus on practising. Afterwards, they can check their performance on a laptop. “We asked coaches, ‘How do you teach a shot? What do you consider good form?’ ” says Cynthia Kuo, co-founder of Vibrado in Sunnyvale, California, which developed the sleeve. “They look at things like keeping your elbow in, following through with your wrist, and keeping your arm up, but not too far up. So we created a model of the textbook shot.” The software can also calculate the arc of the ball as it leaves the hand. This could be useful as previous studies have shown that there is an ideal release angle depending on where the player is on the court. Releasing the ball at an angle of around 52 degrees gives the best chance of success for free throws, which are always taken from around 4.5 metres from the basket, for example. “Coaches can give players specific skills to work on – they can say, ‘I want you to go home and take 100 free throws’ or something – and the sleeve will help them work on their form,” Kuo says. The sleeve has been in testing over the last few months at the Top Flight Sports Academy in San Jose, California, which trains promising teenage players hoping to play at college level. An app is being developed so that players can check their performance on a smartphone. “This would be very good for teaching consistency,” says Larry Silverberg at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who studies the mechanics behind basketball shots. But he says the device’s usefulness is limited as it can’t help players with footwork, which can be crucial. A shot “starts with the feet and goes up from there”, he says. Michael Reilly n “The sleeve keeps track of every arm movement and compares it with an ideal model of arm motion” –Get it right every time– DAN CARLSON/SPIRAL MOON MEDIA A holy house of cards You’ll never look at a toilet roll in the same way again. Last week a “cardboard cathedral” was unveiled in Christchurch, New Zealand, replacing the building destroyed by the 2011 earthquake. Designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, the Transitional Cathedral is made from 98 giant cardboard tubes, holds 700 people and is designed to withstand earthquakes. The tubes are coated with waterproof polyurethane and are sheltered by a polycarbonate roof that glows when the cathedral is lit at night. “We would have been bringing the future forward a year or two” Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, talks to the BBC about a bid to crowdfund the building of an Ubuntu Edge smartphone, which would be as powerful as a PC. With three days left, the firm had raised a crowdfunding record of more than $11 million - but was still short of its $32 million target. Get some balance in your life Are you politically biased? Maybe you need some balancing. A web browser widget keeps track of the political leanings of your surfing history – and suggests ways to even out your habits. The Balancer, created by Sean Munson at the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues, is an indicator in the corner of your browser window to say if your history is tilting to the left or right, with suggestions of sites to visit to get an alternative viewpoint. In tests, it pushed users towards a slightly more varied diet of news. Magnetic robot goes nuclear Where humans dare not tread… a magnetic, wall-climbing robot may go instead. Designed to crawl around inside a nuclear reactor after meltdown, Gunryu was made to decommission the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan. The robot, developed by Woosub Lee at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and colleagues, has a dextrous arm that lets it perform laser cutting while it sticks to the walls. ONE PER CENT GETTY
