EFFECTS OF UPPER EXTREMITY FATIGUE ON BASKETBALL SHOOTING ACCURACY

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of upper extremity fatigue on basketball shooting accuracy. Twenty-four elite male basketball players from 2 teams the top 3 Taiwan High Schools were chosen as subjects. After a warm-up and proper practice, they were asked to shoot from 3 varied distance positions before and after fatigue protocols. The protocols used were the chest press and wrist curls. Results show that the shooting accuracies in different distance positions declined significantly after the chess press protocol, however, there was no significant difference in shooting accuracy after doing the wrist-curls protocol. The results suggested that avoiding shoulder muscle fatigue should keep the shooting accuracy constant and in return helping them win a basketball game

Pion PDFs confronted by Fixed-Target Charmonium Production

The pion, as the Goldstone boson of the strong interaction, is the lightest QCD bound state and responsible for the long-range nucleon-nucleon interaction inside the nucleus. Our knowledge on the pion partonic structure is limited by the existing Drell-Yan data which are primarily sensitive to the pion valence-quark distributions. The recent progress of global analysis of pion's parton distribution functions (PDFs) utilizing various experimental approaches are introduced. From comparisons between the pion-induced $J/\psi$ and $\psi(2S)$ production data with theoretical calculations using the CEM and NRQCD models, we show how these charmonium production data could provide useful constraints on the pion PDFs.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures; invited review. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2006.06947, arXiv:2209.0407

Induction of cyclooxygenase-2 overexpression in human gastric epithelial cells by Helicobacter pylori involves TLR2/TLR9 and c-Srcdependent nuclear factor-

ABSTRACT Gastric epithelial cells were incubated with a panel of clinical isolates of Helicobacter pylori, including nonulcer dyspepsia with gastritis (HS, n ϭ 20), gastric ulcer (HU, n ϭ 20), duodenal ulcer (HD, n ϭ 21), and gastric cancer (HC, n ϭ 20). HC strains induced a higher cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) expression than those from HS, HD, and HU. The bacterial virulence factors and the host cellular pathways were investigated. Virulence genes of iceA, vacA, babA2, cagA 3Ј repeat region, and hrgA failed to show any association with the disease status and COX-2 expression. Methylation-specific polymerase chain reaction revealed HC strains not affecting the methylation status of COX-2 promoter. Nuclear factor (NF)-B, NF-interleukin 6, and cAMP response element were found to be involved in COX-2 induction. We explored a novel NF-B activation pathway. The mutants of TLR2 and TLR9, but not TLR4, inhibited H. pyloriinduced COX-2 promoter activity, and neutralizing antibodies for TLR2 and TLR9 abolished H. pylori-induced COX-2 expression