Judging where a ball will go: the case of curved free kicks in football

This study examined whether adding spin to a ball in the free kick situation in football affects a professional footballer's perception of the ball's future arrival position. Using a virtual reality set-up, participants observed the flight paths of aerodynamically realistic free kicks with (+/- 600 rpm) and without sidespin. With the viewpoint being fixed in the centre of the goal, participants had to judge whether the ball would have ended up in the goal or not. Results show that trajectories influenced by the Magnus force caused by sidespin gave rise to a significant shift in the percentage of goal responses. The resulting acceleration that causes the ball to continually change its heading direction as the trajectory unfolds does not seem to be taken into account by the participants when making goal judgments. We conclude that the visual system is not attuned to such accelerated motion, which may explain why goalkeepers appear to misjudge the future arrival point of such curved free kicks.

‘‘An old quarrel between us that will never be at an end": Middleton’s Women Beware Women and Late Jacobean Religious Politics

In this article, I examine Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women as a response to the particular religio-political context in the years surrounding 1621. The onset of the Thirty Years War in 1618 and the subsequent humiliation of James' son-in-law Frederick, Elector of Palatine, the vexed question of a possible Catholic marriage for Charles, Prince of Wales, the ever present difficulty of Anglo-Catholic relations, particularly with Spain, as well as growing religious factionalism within the Church of England between Calvinists and Arminians: all contributed towards a culturally febrile atmosphere, one to which, as I will argue, Middleton was well placed to respond. Given Middleton's Calvinistic beliefs, I suggest that Women Beware Women offers an acerbic examination of contemporary debates concerning human will, especially women's will, as well as promoting a sceptically apocalyptic anti-Catholic agenda throughout. I also examine the religious language and imagery used to construct Bianca as the whore of Babylon, and argue that her emergence and fall offer a political commentary on the precarious position of the English Church around 1621.

Will Antiangiogenic Agents be a Future for Mesothelioma Therapy?

Background: Malignant mesothelioma (MM) is an aggressive disease that is diagnosed mostly in locally advanced or metastatic stage. In this condition chemotherapy with the combination cisplatin and pemetrexed or ralitrexed represents the standard treatment as supported by a phase III study. However, chemotherapy has very limited effect on the improvement of survival of patients and very few of the MM patients survive more than 2 years. A better understanding of molecular mechanisms and pathways involved in angiogenesis in MM is the basis for the development of new drugs targeted against these pathways responsible for the proliferation and survival of tumor cells.