NEW AT THIS SITE
	Mary Ann Wallace

We're inaugurating publication of the Encyclopedia with several fine articles. Tom Fahey has contributed an overview on anabolic steroids, and Harm Kuipers has focused on their side effects. We also have timely articles for the winter sport season in the northern hemisphere that discuss treatment and rehabilitation of a skier's nightmare, tearing of the ACL (anterior cruciate ligament). Football and basketball players are also particularly susceptible. One article by Mervyn Cross deals with general treatment and rehabilitation; the other by Michael Dunn is on surgical prostheses.

Speed skaters aren't immune to the risk of an ACL tear, but they survived a number of crashes at the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics and made the news with record-breaking accomplishments using clapskates. On our News page, Todd Allinger reports on how technology contributed to the new world records in speed skating at Nagano.

And competition wasn't the only thing taking place at Nagano. The International Olympic Committee met and finally granted bodybuilding provisional status as an Olympic sport. Fred Hatfield tells us the story behind the scenes and the rationale for this sport being added to the Sydney Summer Olympics in 2000.

The Winter Olympics--images of snow and ice bring to mind dramatic skiing competition. Norway, which considers itself the birthplace of skiing, won 25 medals, second only to Germany's 29. Norway's Scandinavian neighbor, Sweden, won only three, even though those two countries were considered sport rivals for decades. Stephen Seiler looks at the reasons for Norway's success and Sweden's lackluster results in A Tale of Two Countries.

The Ferret is worried about muscle fatigue! He also got real curious about ketogenic diets, but wasn't sure they'd help him go faster. Instead, he's off to try a different practice strategy in sharpening his skills. Check out these and other hot topics that have people buzzing. And if you've got something to pass on, send a paragraph or two to ferret=AT=sportsci.org.

In his latest History Maker's column, Frank Katch reveals how William Beaumont's experiments on digestion inspired contemporary studies on electrolyte balance, rehydration, and nutritional supplementation with sports drinks. Before Beaumont's experiments, scientists believed the stomach either produced heat that somehow cooked foods or served as a "fermenting vat". Beaumont, a practicing physician, discovered the role that gastric juice played in breaking down foods to simpler substances.

Ken Daley's newsletter has plenty of places for you to visit on the Internet. Recreation professionals can tap into a recreation database that provides everything from training manuals to conference and workshop presentations. Females have their own sports-news website; and Alta Vista does more than just search--it offers literal translations of text or whole Web pages (link to it directly with the Altavista search form on our Search pages). Medical sites, free web page hosting, and more.

Is supplementing with creatine worthwhile for bodybuilders, sprinters, and other athletes? Are there any side effects? Before you recommend it to your athlete for high-intensity events or reach for the bottle yourself, read the findings on creatine supplementation in the latest review in Training & Technology.

What are your options when you plan a research study? In Quantitative Research Designs, Will Hopkins reviews the choices, explains where they differ in the quality of evidence they provide, and outlines their impact on sample size. There's also a section on what variables to measure: here he identifies mechanism variables and explores new territory in using them to estimate the magnitude of placebo effects in unblinded experiments.

In A New View of Statistics, Will has updated the section on validity to make it similar to the revised treatment of reliability: he defines and gives equal emphasis to the concepts systematic offset, standard deviation of the estimate, and validity correlation. He also includes a figure to make it clear why you shouldn't use standard error of the mean, and he has a warning for specialists using proc mixed in SAS to model covariances in repeated-measures analyses of crossovers.

Our Forum page, which allows you to access recent messages sent to the Sportscience mailing list, now has a better arrangement of frames. If Net traffic is heavy, the messages appearing in the lower frame can take a while to load. Past messages are kept only for a couple of months by www.reference.com, who manages the archive. If you want to search for anything older, you'll have to use old archives in the top frame of the Forum page. It's a less friendly search mechanism that will email your search results rather than allow you to view them online.

Will Hopkins has recently visited all the free Medline search sites. He thinks the Healthgate advanced search form is the fastest, friendliest, and the best for retrieving bibliographic information. He's updated this form on our Net Search page for journal references to bring it into line with Healthgate's latest form. And try out the new Altavista search form with its link to translations, currently English to and from French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

We welcome Todd Allinger as one of our contributing editors. Check out the team on the Contact Us page. We do need more webmasters to help out, especially with the Encyclopedia. If you are good at converting documents, have time to spare and frequent online access, email us at webmaster=AT=sportsci.org.