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Los Dallas Wings han contratado al ex entrenador de los Sparks, Curt Miller, como director general

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el Alas de Dallas Su nombre es dos veces WNBA El Entrenador del Año Kurt Miller será el próximo gerente general, anunció el equipo el viernes.

Miller, quien entrenó al equipo las últimas dos temporadas. Chispas de Los Ángeles Y los siete capítulos anteriores a eso con Sol de Connecticutllenará el vacío en Dallas como parte de una reestructuración regulatoria más amplia. A mediados de octubre, Dallas anunció que despediría a la entrenadora en jefe Latricia Trammell y que el presidente y director ejecutivo Greg Bibb contrataría a un gerente general que supervisaría las operaciones diarias de baloncesto de la franquicia.

Siete franquicias, sin incluir a los Golden State Valkyries entrantes, han realizado cambios de entrenador en jefe esta temporada baja, incluidos los Sparks luego de la partida de Miller. Dallas también fue una de las tres franquicias: Místicos de Washington y Ases de Las Vegas Ser otros es tener una apertura para GM.

Miller tiene experiencia previa como gerente general, desempeñando funciones duales de entrenador/gerente general con el Sun a partir de septiembre de 2016. Durante su mandato con el Sun, Connecticut alcanzó las Finales de la WNBA y otras cuatro apariciones en semifinales.

“Con una nueva arena e instalaciones de práctica en el horizonte, una plantilla talentosa que tiene un impacto tanto en el campo como en la comunidad, una posición emocionante en el próximo draft, una base de seguidores apasionados y leales, un grupo de propietarios totalmente comprometido y una plantilla dedicada. “Como entrenador en jefe veterano y gerente general de la WNBA, espero traer mi experiencia, pasión y liderazgo a Texas mientras nos esforzamos por lograrlo. Cuelga el cartel del campeonato de la WNBA en Dallas”.

Miller estuvo a punto de llegar a Dallas hace dos temporadas, cuando fue finalista para el puesto de entrenador de los Wings en 2023 antes de finalmente asumir el cargo de Sparks, dijeron fuentes de la liga. el atleta. También será vicepresidente ejecutivo de operaciones de baloncesto en Dallas.


Kurt Miller se reúne con los jugadores de Sparks durante el partido contra Minnesota Lynx el 5 de junio de 2024. (Foto: Juan Ocampo/NBAE vía Getty Images)

En Los Ángeles, Miller fue contratado para encabezar una reconstrucción, pero aun así fue despedido después de dos temporadas en las que tuvo marca de 25-55.

Pep dijo en un comunicado que cree que la “capacidad de Curt para construir equipos ganadores, así como su éxito como entrenador en la WNBA y más allá, resultarán invaluables”.

Una de las primeras prioridades de Miller será contratar un nuevo entrenador en jefe y preparar la franquicia para el próximo draft de expansión, previsto para el 6 de diciembre.

El 17 de noviembre, los Wings también descubrirán su posición en el draft. A pesar de que tienen el segundo peor récord combinado en las últimas dos temporadas, entran a la lotería con las mejores probabilidades de obtener la primera selección, porque tienen un 22,7 por ciento de posibilidades de obtener la selección con su propia selección, y otra 22.7. La oportunidad de obtener selección mediante derechos de permuta de selección con cielo de chicago. Esto les da un 45,4 por ciento de posibilidades combinadas de obtener la primera selección, mientras que los Sparks tienen un 44,2 por ciento de posibilidades de obtener la primera selección.

Miller y los Wings tendrán que tomar una serie de decisiones clave esta temporada. Delantero veterano Natasha Howard Ya ha dicho que probará el mercado de agentes libres y está considerando un nuevo equipo. Sattu Sabalidelantera del primer equipo All-WNBA de 2023, también es agente libre sin restricciones y podría fichar por otro lado.

Los Wings terminaron 9-31 la temporada pasada, pero están a solo un año de ser el cuarto puesto en los playoffs.

Como parte de los cambios organizacionales más amplios, la franquicia también anunció ascensos al veterano asistente del gerente general Travis Charles, quien ahora se desempeñará como vicepresidente senior de operaciones de baloncesto y asistente del gerente general, así como a la ex jugadora de la WNBA convertida en entrenadora de desarrollo de los Wings, Jasmine Thomas. quien ahora se desempeñará como Vicepresidente de Operaciones de Baloncesto y Subgerente General.

Dallas también tiene como objetivo mudarse a una nueva instalación de práctica para el inicio de la temporada 2026, mudándose de Arlington a un estadio renovado en el centro de Dallas también para esta temporada.

Lectura requerida

(Foto: Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News vía Getty Images)

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African wild dogs with pleading eyes sparks rethink of dog evolution

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“Puppy-dog eyes didn’t just evolve for us, in domestic dogs,” says comparative anatomist Heather Smith. Her team’s work has thrown a 2019 finding1 that the muscles in dogs’ eyebrows evolved to communicate with humans in the doghouse by showing that African wild dogs also have the muscles to make the infamous pleading expression. The study was published on 10 April in The Anatomical Record2.

Now, one of the researchers who described the evolution of puppy-dog eyebrow muscles is considering what the African dog discovery means for canine evolution. “It opens a door to thinking about where dogs come from, and what they are,” says Anne Burrows, a biological anthropologist at the Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and author of the earlier paper.

Evolution of canine eyebrows

The 2019 study garnered headlines around the world when it found that the two muscles responsible for creating the sad–sweet puppy-dog stare are pronounced in several domestic breeds (Canis familiaris), but almost absent in wolves (Canis lupus).

If the social dynamic between humans and dogs drove eyebrow evolution, Smith wondered whether the highly social African wild dog might also have expressive brows.

African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) are native to sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1997 and 2012, their numbers dropped by half in some areas. With only 8,000 or so remaining in the wild, studying them is difficult but crucial for conservation efforts.

Smith, who is based at Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona, and her colleagues dissected a recently deceased African wild dog from Phoenix Zoo. They found that both the levator anguli oculi medalis (LAOM) and the retractor anguli oculi lateralis (RAOL) muscles, credited with creating the puppy-dog expression, were similar in size to those of domestic dog breeds.

“We could see distinct fibres that are very prominent, very robust,” says Smith. Although the researchers only looked at one African wild dog, Smith says it’s unlikely that such a large and well-developed muscle would be present in one animal and not others.

A communication strategy

The team proposes that the gregarious African wild dogs evolved these muscles to communicate with each other. They use a range of vocal cues to organize hunts and share resources, but until now, non-vocal strategies haven’t been studied.

Burrows speculates that more dog species might have muscles for facial expression than the researchers realized when they compared wolves and domestic dogs. “I wonder if these muscles have been around for a really long time and wolves are the ones that lost them.”

Muhammad Spocter, an anatomist at Des Moines University in West Des Moines, Iowa, says the study is exciting, but cautions against making assumptions about wild dog behaviour based on their physical structure. “Just because the anatomy is there, is it being used?” says Spocter. “And how is it being used?”

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Did ‘alien’ debris hit Earth? Startling claim sparks row at scientific meeting

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An electron microprobe image of a grey sphere on a black background. The sphere has a partially irregular surface and is about 200 micrometres across according to the scale bar.

Avi Loeb and his team say that metallic balls found near Papua New Guinea could be of extraterrestrial origin.Credit: Avi Loeb’s photo collection

The Woodlands, Texas

A sensational claim made last year that an ‘alien’ meteorite hit Earth near Papua New Guinea in 2014 got its first in-person airing with the broader scientific community on 12 March. At the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, scientists clashed over whether a research team has indeed found fragments of a space rock that came from outside the Solar System.

The debate occurred at a packed session featuring Hairuo Fu, a graduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is a member of the team that found the fragments. Team leader Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard who did not attend the conference, has made other controversial claims about extraterrestrial discoveries. Many scientists have said that they don’t want to spend much of their time analysing and refuting these claims.

During his presentation, Fu described tiny metallic blobs that Loeb’s expedition dredged from the sea floor near Papua New Guinea last year, and said that the spherules have a chemical composition of unknown origin1. He then faced questions from a long line of scientists sceptical of the implications of extraterrestrial material. “At the very least, it is something different from what we know,” Fu responded.

New work questions the team’s findings. In a manuscript posted on the arXiv preprint server on 8 March2, ahead of peer review, a researcher argues that the debris collected by Loeb and his co-workers is actually molten blobs generated when an asteroid hit Earth 788,000 years ago.

“What they found has all the characteristics of microtektites — little pieces of melted Earth that came from this impact,” says preprint author Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Meanwhile, other studies are challenging different aspects of Loeb’s claim, such as whether the meteor that reportedly produced the fragments was on the trajectory Loeb says it was. Together, the findings show how the broader scientific community is engaging with Loeb’s extraterrestrial claims, in spite of reluctance to do so.

A unique find?

‘Interstellar’ objects remained in the realm of theory until 2017, when astronomers spotted the first known celestial object to be on a trajectory that meant it could only have come from outside the Solar System. Loeb made headlines when he speculated that the object, a comet-like body named ‘Oumuamua, was an artefact sent by an extraterrestrial civilization.

‘Oumuamua passed through the Solar System far from Earth, but Loeb hoped to find another interstellar object that had hit the planet. He later proposed that a bright meteor that appeared in the sky north of Papua New Guinea in January 2014 had an interstellar trajectory and could have scattered debris in the ocean.

Three people use a vacuum tool on a metallic sledge on board a ship.

Avi Loeb (in hat) and colleagues recover particles from a magnetic sledge on their 2023 expedition.Credit: Avi Loeb’s photo collection

In June 2023, Loeb led a privately funded expedition to the site that used magnetic sledges to recover more than 800 metallic spherules from the sea floor. About one-quarter of the spherules had chemical compositions indicating that they came from igneous, or once-molten, rocks. Of those, a handful were unusually enriched in the elements beryllium, lanthanum and uranium. The researchers concluded that those spherules are unlike any known materials in the Solar System1.

However, Desch counters that the spherules could have come from an asteroid impact in southeast Asia. Key to his proposal2 is a kind of soil called laterite, which forms in tropical regions when heavy rainfall carries some chemical elements from the topmost layers of soil into deeper ones. This leaves the upper soil enriched in other elements, including beryllium, lanthanum and uranium — similar to the composition of the spherules collected by Loeb and his colleagues. Desch says that an asteroid known to have struck the region around 788,000 years ago3 probably hit lateritic rock and created the molten blobs found by Loeb’s team.

In an e-mail to Nature, Loeb argues that spherules from an impact 788,000 years ago should have been buried by ocean sediments. Desch counters that sedimentation rates are relatively low in the offshore area where the spherules were collected.

But others are sceptical of Desch’s proposal, too. Scientists have yet to find any confirmed tektites from lateritic rock, notes Pierre Rochette, a geoscientist at Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence, France, who is not affiliated with either team. And very few tektites are magnetic, he says, so it would be difficult for Loeb and his colleagues to have pulled up hundreds from the sea floor.

Fiery critiques

Desch was not the only scientist to challenge Loeb’s work this week.

After Fu’s conference presentation, Ben Fernando, a seismologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, spoke and took aim at claims concerning the 2014 meteor. Fernando and his colleagues, including Desch, analysed seismic and acoustic data gathered by ground-based sensors at the time the meteor hit the atmosphere4. Data from a seismometer on nearby Manus Island, which Loeb and his team studied as they were deciding where to dredge, show no characteristics of a high-altitude fireball — but do indicate a vehicle driving past, Fernando said. “This is almost certainly a truck,” he told the meeting. A second set of observations, made using infrasound sensors that listen for clandestine nuclear tests, seems to have detected the meteor hitting the atmosphere, but suggests it happened around 170 kilometres away from where Loeb’s team calculates.

Loeb told Nature that such critiques do not take into account US Department of Defense data that he says confirm the exact trajectory of that fireball. But because those data are held by the government, they have not been independently cross-checked by other scientists.

As conference-goers poured out of the room after his talk, Fu told Nature that Loeb’s team is working on further analyses, such as isotopic studies, that could shed more light on what the spherules are. After that, Fu said, he is looking forward to graduating and working on a new project — on how the Moon was formed.

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