Publications by authors named "R J Bowers"

Overhead sports place a significant amount of stress on the shoulder. There are a variety of activities and sports with overhead athletes including both throwing (baseball, softball, football, cricket) and nonthrowing (tennis, swimming, volleyball) sports. Although all of these overhead motions can lead to pathology, a large focus has been on the consequences of overhead throwing.

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Injury to the elbow is very common in the throwing athlete and can potentially lead to long absences from play and, in the most severe scenarios, medical retirement. The throwing motion is a highly complex series of movements through the entire kinetic chain that results in very high angular velocities and valgus forces at the elbow joint. The repetitive nature of overhead throwing in combination with the high levels of accumulated force at the elbow puts both pediatric and adult athletes at risk of both acute and chronic overuse injuries of the elbow.

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  • - Sweet potato is a crucial crop for global food security, but its complex genetics make breeding difficult; genome-wide association studies (GWAS) can help improve breeding efficiency.
  • - A study identified 28 SNPs at 21 genetic loci linked to traits like dry matter content and skin/flesh color in sweet potatoes, using data from the USDA germplasm collection.
  • - Candidate genes related to these traits include transcription factors and enzymes involved in starch and carotenoid production, which aid in developing new sweet potato varieties through marker-assisted breeding.
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  • Diagnostic ultrasound is now a key tool used alongside electrodiagnostic studies to identify upper extremity entrapment neuropathy.
  • Studies show that measuring the nerve cross-sectional area at the wrist and elbow using ultrasound is highly effective for diagnosing common median and ulnar neuropathies.
  • There is currently no expert agreement on the best practices for using these ultrasound reference values, indicating that developing guidelines should be prioritized.
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Interpreting and responding to environmental cues from different modalities has survival value. In fish, the role of multimodal perception has been studied in regard to both foraging and risk assessment, with modalities including vision, olfaction, and mechanoreception via lateral lines. We studied reef fish boldness by placing novel objects that obstructed vision, lateral line use, or both into a coral reef environment with native algal samples inside, and then quantifying exploration as a function of obstruction type and as a function of functional diet groups (herbivores, omnivores, carnivores).

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