Go Out and Play: Youth Sports in America

This study measures the nationwide participation rates of girls and boys in exercise and organized team sports. The central focus is on how the intersections among families, schools and communities are related to children's involvement and interest in athletics and physical activity. Some of the personal and social benefits associated with children's athletic participation are also identified and discussed. The athletic interests and involvements of girls and boys are examined from childhood through late adolescence, including entry into sport as well as drop-out patterns

Her Life Depends On It: Sport, Physical Activity and the Health and Well-Being of American Girls

This report is a comprehensive compendium of research that points to physical activity and sport as fundamental solutions for many of the serious health and social problems faced by American girls. An appreciable mass of evidence-based knowledge about girls' involvement with sport and physical activity has been generated during the last decade. The amount and quality of this research are uneven and varied. For example, a good deal of research examines the associations between physical activity and risk for coronary heart disease, but studies that focus on risk for Alzheimer's disease are just beginning to issue. Researchers have verified links between high school athletic participation and teen pregnancy prevention, although more longitudinal research is needed to thoroughly confirm the connections. Overall, however, this report shows that the current state of knowledge on the relationship of physical activity to the health and social needs of American girls warrants the serious attention of public health officials, educators and sport leaders

Her Life Depends on it III: Sport, Physical Activity and the Health and Well-being of American Girls and Women

Her Life Depends On It III is the Women's Sports Foundation's comprehensive report that reviews existing and emerging research on the links between participation in sport and physical activity and the health and wellbeing of American girls and women. As with the previous editions in 2004 and 2009, this study also confirms that physical activity and sport provides the critical foundation, in no small part, that allows girls and women to lead healthy, strong, and fulfilled lives. Ten years since its first publication, the updated Her Life Depends On It provides an even more comprehensive review of the ever-expanding body of research that demonstrates how important it is for girls and women to participate in sport and physical activity. The report's contents reflect the review of 1,500 studies, nearly 400 covered since the previous edition

Untangling the Links Among Athletic Involvement, Gender, Race, and Adolescent Academic Outcomes

Although previous research has established that high school sports participation may be associated with positive academic outcomes, the parameters of the relationship remain unclear. Using a longitudinal sample of nearly 600 Western New York adolescents, this study examined gender- and race-specific differences in the impact of two dimensions of adolescent athletic involvement (“jock” identity and athlete status) on changes in school grades and school misconduct over a two-year interval. Female and black adolescents who identified themselves as “jocks” reported lower grades than those who did not, whereas female athletes reported higher grades than female nonathletes. Jocks also reported significantly more misconduct (including skipping school, cutting classes, having someone from home called to the school for disciplinary purposes, and being sent to the principal’s office) than nonjocks. Gender moderated the relationship between athlete status and school misconduct; athletic participation had a less salutary effect on misconduct for girls than for boys

Development and Evolution of the Muscles of the Pelvic Fin

Locomotor strategies in terrestrial tetrapods have evolved from the utilisation of sinusoidal contractions of axial musculature, evident in ancestral fish species, to the reliance on powerful and complex limb muscles to provide propulsive force. Within tetrapods, a hindlimb-dominant locomotor strategy predominates, and its evolution is considered critical for the evident success of the tetrapod transition onto land. Here, we determine the developmental mechanisms of pelvic fin muscle formation in living fish species at critical points within the vertebrate phylogeny and reveal a stepwise modification from a primitive to a more derived mode of pelvic fin muscle formation. A distinct process generates pelvic fin muscle in bony fishes that incorporates both primitive and derived characteristics of vertebrate appendicular muscle formation. We propose that the adoption of the fully derived mode of hindlimb muscle formation from this bimodal character state is an evolutionary innovation that was critical to the success of the tetrapod transition

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

ŽENE I SPORT U CRNOJ GORI

This paper is part of a larger study that identifies who plays sport in Montenegro, and the factors (family, education, economic, religious, cultural stereotypes, and so on) that contribute to girls and women’s participation in sport or that limit girls and women’s participation in sport. This study is the first evidencebased research assessing the current status of girls and women’s sport participation in Montenegro, at all institutional levels. Using mixed-methodologies (quantitative assessment, survey data and qualitative focus group interviews) this study will determine the numbers of girls and women participating in sport, as compared to boys and men in similar demographic categories, and to examine why girls and women do or do not participate in sport and what are their experiences in sport. Initial findings from the demographic assessment of sport in Montenegro illustrate overall gender disparities in sport participation in the 7 most popular sports; the majority of athletes, coaches, managers and decision-makers, medical staff, referees and sport delegates were men. We found the greatest gender imbalance in soccer and basketball, which were overwhelmingly male-dominated, and the greatest gender parity in handball and volleyball- and in some cases there were more female participants than male participants in these sports. We also examined overall trends in gender and sport participation across the different geographical regions, which were similar. However, there were differences in the types of sports men and women played in the different regions, which may indicate that some sports were more popular, or accepted, or easier to access for women in the central part of the country while other sports were more popular, or accepted or easier to access for women in the northern and southern regions. The project is a collaborative partnership with US- and Montenegro based scholars, the International Olympic Committee, the Montenegrin Olympic Committee, the United Nations Development Program, the Office for Gender Equality of the Ministry for Human and Minority Right of Montenegro, and NGO Inovativnost. Reflections and insights on multi-institutional partnerships in the study gender and sport participation will be offered