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This study examined associations between cumulative training load, travel demands and recovery days with athlete-reported outcome measures (AROMs) and countermovement jump (CMJ) performance in professional basketball. Retrospective analysis was performed on data collected from 23 players (mean±SD: age = 24.7±2.5 years, height = 198.3±7.6 cm, body mass = 98.1±9.0 kg, wingspan = 206.8±8.4 cm) from 2018-2020 in the National Basketball Association G-League. Linear mixed models were used to describe variation in AROMs and CMJ data in relation to cumulative training load (previous 3- and 10-days), hours travelled (previous 3- and 10-day), days away from the team's home city, recovery days (i.e., no travel/minimal on-court activity) and individual factors (e.g., age, fatigue, soreness). Cumulative 3-day training load had negative associations with fatigue, soreness, and sleep, while increased recovery days were associated with improved soreness scores. Increases in hours travelled and days spent away from home over 10 days were associated with increased sleep quality and duration. Cumulative training load over 3 and 10 days, hours travelled and days away from home city were all associated with changes in CMJ performance during the eccentric phase. The interaction of on-court and travel related stressors combined with individual factors is complex, meaning that multiple athletes response measures are needed to understand fatigue and recovery cycles. Our findings support the utility of the response measures presented (i.e., CMJ and AROMs), but this is not an exhaustive battery and practitioners should consider what measures may best inform training periodization within the context of their environment/sport., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

The evolutionary origin of human language and its neurobiological foundations has long been the object of intense scientific debate. Although a number of theories have been proposed, one particularly contentious model suggests that human language evolved from a manual gestural communication system in a common ape-human ancestor. Consistent with a gestural origins theory are data indicating that chimpanzees intentionally and referentially communicate via manual gestures, and the production of manual gestures, in conjunction with vocalizations, activates the chimpanzee Broca's area homologue--a region in the human brain that is critical for the planning and execution of language. However, it is not known if this activity observed in the chimpanzee Broca's area is the result of the chimpanzees producing manual communicative gestures, communicative sounds, or both. This information is critical for evaluating the theory that human language evolved from a strictly manual gestural system. To this end, we used positron emission tomography (PET) to examine the neural metabolic activity in the chimpanzee brain. We collected PET data in 4 subjects, all of whom produced manual communicative gestures. However, 2 of these subjects also produced so-called attention-getting vocalizations directed towards a human experimenter. Interestingly, only the two subjects that produced these attention-getting sounds showed greater mean metabolic activity in the Broca's area homologue as compared to a baseline scan. The two subjects that did not produce attention-getting sounds did not. These data contradict an exclusive "gestural origins" theory for they suggest that it is vocal signaling that selectively activates the Broca's area homologue in chimpanzees. In other words, the activity observed in the Broca's area homologue reflects the production of vocal signals by the chimpanzees, suggesting that this critical human language region was involved in vocal signaling in the common ancestor of both modern humans and chimpanzees.

Functional imaging studies in humans have localized the motor-hand region to a neuroanatomical landmark call the KNOB within the precentral gyrus. It has also been reported that the KNOB is larger in the hemisphere contralateral to an individual's preferred hand, and therefore may represent the neural substrate for handedness. The KNOB has also been neuronatomically described in chimpanzees and other great apes and is similarly associated with handedness. However, whether the chimpanzee KNOB represents the hand region is unclear from the extant literature. Here, we used PET to quantify neural metabolic activity in chimpanzees when engaged in unilateral reach-and-grasping responses and found significantly lateralized activation of the KNOB region in the hemisphere contralateral to the hand used by the chimpanzees. We subsequently constructed a probabilistic map of the KNOB region in chimpanzees in order to assess the overlap in consistency in the anatomical landmarks of the KNOB with the functional maps generated from the PET analysis. We found significant overlap in the anatomical and functional voxels comprising the KNOB region, suggesting that the KNOB does correspond to the hand region in chimpanzees. Lastly, from the probabilistic maps, we compared right- and left-handed chimpanzees on lateralization in grey and white matter within the KNOB region and found that asymmetries in white matter of the KNOB region were larger in the hemisphere contralateral to the preferred hand. These results suggest that neuroanatomical asymmetries in the KNOB likely reflect changes in connectivity in primary motor cortex that are experience dependent in chimpanzees and possibly humans.

In the event of a terrorist-mediated attack in the United States using radiological or improvised nuclear weapons, it is expected that hundreds of thousands of people could be exposed to life-threatening levels of ionizing radiation. We have recently shown that genome-wide expression analysis of the peripheral blood (PB) can generate gene expression profiles that can predict radiation exposure and distinguish the dose level of exposure following total body irradiation (TBI). However, in the event a radiation-mass casualty scenario, many victims will have heterogeneous exposure due to partial shielding and it is unknown whether PB gene expression profiles would be useful in predicting the status of partially irradiated individuals. Here, we identified gene expression profiles in the PB that were characteristic of anterior hemibody-, posterior hemibody- and single limb-irradiation at 0.5 Gy, 2 Gy and 10 Gy in C57Bl6 mice. These PB signatures predicted the radiation status of partially irradiated mice with a high level of accuracy (range 79-100%) compared to non-irradiated mice. Interestingly, PB signatures of partial body irradiation were poorly predictive of radiation status by site of injury (range 16-43%), suggesting that the PB molecular response to partial body irradiation was anatomic site specific. Importantly, PB gene signatures generated from TBI-treated mice failed completely to predict the radiation status of partially irradiated animals or non-irradiated controls. These data demonstrate that partial body irradiation, even to a single limb, generates a characteristic PB signature of radiation injury and thus may necessitate the use of multiple signatures, both partial body and total body, to accurately assess the status of an individual exposed to radiation.

Background: The left hemisphere of the human brain is dominant in the production of speech and signed language. Whether similar lateralization of function for communicative signal production is present in other primates remains a topic of considerable debate. In the current study, we examined whether oro-facial movements associated with the production of learned attention-getting sounds are differentially lateralized compared to facial expressions associated with the production of species-typical emotional vocalizations in chimpanzees., Methodology/principal Findings: Still images captured from digital video were used to quantify oro-facial asymmetries in the production of two attention-getting sounds and two species-typical vocalizations in a sample of captive chimpanzees. Comparisons of mouth asymmetries during production of these sounds revealed significant rightward biased asymmetries for the attention-getting sounds and significant leftward biased asymmetries for the species-typical sounds., Conclusions/significance: These results suggest that the motor control of oro-facial movements associated with the production of learned sounds is lateralized to the left hemisphere in chimpanzees. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the antecedents for lateralization of human speech may have been present in the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans approximately 5 mya and are not unique to the human lineage.