• In relation to the July 11 All Star Game that was held in Pittsburgh, several newspaper articles looked at the history of minority participation in baseball, particularly in the two Pittsburgh Negro League teams: the Crawfords and Homestead Grays. More than a dozen print media outlets quoted Pitt faculty member Rob Ruck, including, on July 10, the Associated Press, whose story addressed how some of baseball’s “greats who never played in the majors or did so only briefly because of racial discrimination are being remembered.” Such remembrances include seven statues at PNC Park of former Black baseball stars and Ruck’s documentary about the Negro Leagues, titled “Kings on the Hill.” For Ruck, the July 9 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article said, the demise of the Negro Leagues presents a subtext of severe damage: “[W]ith integration, the Black community lost control of its own sporting institutions,” Ruck said. “You don’t want to cast this as an either-or, that it would have been better to keep segregation,” Ruck said in the P-G article, “but there were ways to integrate that could have preserved Black control over certain institutions.”

• A story discussing recent discoveries in the field of mind-control technology addressed a new study conducted by researchers at Neural Signals, an Atlanta-based company. A July 13 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article said that researchers at that company have found that with the aid of a tiny electronic chip implanted in the brain’s motor cortex, a 25-year-old man paralyzed from the neck down for five years was able to use his thoughts to complete motor tasks. Stories on the subject also appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Philadelphia Inquirer, Denver Post, Florida Sun-Sentinel, New Jersey Star-Ledger, and more than 50 other news outlets. Andrew Schwartz, professor of neurobiology in Pitt’s School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study but who conducts research on brain-computer interactions, was quoted in the WSJ article as saying that while the device developed by Neural Signals is “a start, showing efficacy in a human…[it is] still far from being a useful device.” Schwartz was quoted to similar effect in the other articles.

• Time magazine quoted two Pitt faculty members in stories that appeared in its July 10 issue. The first story looked at the ways in which siblings and interactions between them shape how people develop into adults; it quoted Pitt Professor of Psychology Daniel Shaw as saying that, “in general, parents serve the same big-picture role as doctors on grand rounds. Siblings are like the nurses on the ward. They’re there every day.” The second story looked at a recently completed Pitt study, which said, according to Time, that over the course of seven years, women who are more than 100 pounds overweight have an 86 percent higher chance of dying from any cause than do normal-weight women. Women who are less than 30 pounds overweight can take comfort in the fact that their group showed no significantly greater risk of dying over the length of the investigation, the Time article said. But Time also quoted Kathleen McTigue, lead author of the study and assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology in the Division of Internal Medicine in Pitt’s School of Medicine, as saying that the study results “suggest that seven years was not a long-enough time for follow-up in the overweight women” and that it may simply take longer for the fatal effects of heart disease to start showing up among overweight—as opposed to obese—women.