This column features short items about sport research in progress or in print, highlights of recent or upcoming conferences, hot topics on mailing lists, and anything else of interest to the sport-science community.
Content can range from ground-breaking to gossipy.
Items will be edited and bounced back to you for approval. Ferret found the best perspective yet on this question from a chapter in Peak Performance, a new paperback on sports training and nutrition. The average African may be no different from the average non-African, but there's probably a greater diversity of athletic talent among Africans. The evidence comes from recent research comparing the frequency of different variants of the same stretch of DNA in various populations. Non-Africans have less variants, presumably because their forebears migrated out of Africa as a small group with only a small sample of genes from the African gene pool.