NSF / NBC

The biomechanics of weightlifting is one of the topics covered in "Science of the Summer Olympics," a 10-part video series. Click on the image to watch the video.

The London Olympic Games don't start until next week, but if you're a science fan, the programming has already begun: Engineers, athletes and TV types have teamed up for a 10-part video series that delves into Olympic-size subjects ranging from biomechanics to split-second timers.

"Science of the Summer Olympics" is the latest collaboration involving the National Science Foundation, NBC Learn and NBC Olympics. (Like those other NBC units, NBCNews.com is owned by NBCUniversal.) The series builds upon earlier batches of educational videos that focused on the sports of the Winter Olympics as well as football and hockey.

This time around, engineering is squarely in the spotlight.

"The work of engineers not only affects Olympic sports, it also helps us perform ordinary activities in better ways," Thomas Peterson, NSF's assistant director for engineering, said in a news release. "This series will illustrate how engineers can impact both sports and society, and we hope it will inspire young people to pursue engineering."

Among the athletic stars of the videos are Usain Bolt, the world's fastest man; Oscar Pistorius, a Paralympian who will be competing for the first time against able-bodied runners in the Olympics; and swimmer Missy Franklin. One of coolest spots shows how the moves used by superheavyweight weightlifter Sarah Robles could be adapted to enhance a weightlifting robot's capabilities.

"I watch what she's doing, and it blows me away." said Brian Zenowich, a robotics engineer at Barrett Technology. To lift the huge weights in an Olympic-style snatch maneuver, Robles instinctively takes advantage of the barbell's momentum to flip her body from a pulling-up position to a pushing-up position.

"You're moving your body more than you're moving the bar," Robles explains in the video. Zenowich programmed his company's WAM Arm to do something similar, but with a 5-pound weight rather than a huge barbell. For now, Robles has nothing to fear from that particular robot, but the biomechanical tricks learned from athletes could conceivably lead to more humanlike dexterity on the part of future machines.

Lesson plans that capitalize on the videos will be made available via the NBC Learn website in August. In the meantime, check out these other resources for sports science:

• Olympic swimsuits turn athletes into barracudas
• London turns into laboratory for sport science
• Graphic: How video is used to aid tech training
• 'Robotic' cameras will give new view of Olympics
• Take a video shot at the science of hockey
• Are you ready for some football ... science?
• Winter Olympics provide a teachable moment

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NBC Sports Group

Nashville Predators goalie Pekka Rinne gets face time in "Science of NHL Hockey."

Why does a hockey player's stick actually strike the ice behind the puck for a slap shot? How quickly does a player pick up speed during a breakaway? The answers to these and other questions are explored from a scientific point of view in a new series of videos presented by the NHL, the National Science Foundation and NBC Learn.

"Science of NHL Hockey" is the latest video tutorial done up by NBC News' educational arm with the cooperation of sports officials, athletes and scientists. (NBC Universal is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.) It's made for students and teachers to use in the classrooms, in conjunction with specially prepared lesson plans. But you don't need to be in school to check out the series. The videos, anchored by NBC News' Lester Holt, are available online via NBC Learn, NBCSports.com and Science360.gov. You can also catch the segments this weekend during NBC's coverage of the NHL All-Star Game.

The scientific concepts at work in the fastest game on ice are broken down using a high-speed camera that can capture movement at rates of up to 10,000 frames per second. The super-slo-mo views allow for frame-by-frame analysis of the Newtonian physics and biomechanics behind the action. There's even a segment about the science of the Zamboni machine.

"Wayne Gretzky once said, 'The only way a kid is going to practice is if it's total fun for him ... and it was for me,'" Morris Aizenman, senior scientist for NSF's Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, said in a news release about the project. "'Science of NHL Hockey' is an NSF and NBC Learn project that continues our effort to make science total fun for students. We hope, after watching these videos, that students will also want to learn and practice science."

Among the players participating in the series are St. Louis Blues goalie Jaroslav Halak, Colorado Avalanche defenseman Erik Johnson, New York Islanders left wing Matt Moulson, Nashville Predators goalie Pekka Rinne and Dallas Stars left wing Brenden Morrow.

"It was exciting to be part of a unique project that utilizes hockey to help educate students on science and physics," Morrow said. "It was fun to participate in and was very interesting. I learned a lot myself."

More science of sports:

• Ready for some football science?
• Jump into some Olympic-size science
• The math and science of baseball
• Why March Madness isn't that mad
• The science of soccer stats

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Brian Snyder / Reuters

Tiger Woods hits his tee shot on the third hole during final round play in the 2010 Masters golf tournament at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Ga., on April 11, 2010.

Back in the noughties, Tiger Woods, dressed in a red shirt, hoisted a trophy on the 18^th green on almost every Sunday that he started out with at least a share of the lead. Science is helping explain how the red shirt helped him — and why it won't do much for the golfer now.

"It made him feel more confident and powerful and made others shrink in fear of this alpha male among us," Andrew Elliot, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, told me Tuesday.

We were talking about a new study in the journal Emotion where Elliot and colleagues find that our reactions immediately become faster and more forceful when we see red.

The conclusion stems from data showing that students more quickly and strongly pinched a metal clasp or squeezed a handgrip after reading red, gray and blue numbers and words that were controlled for lightness and saturation.

In a sense, the research documents our intuitive reaction to red. "It's a danger cue. So your body reacts as if it has just seen a threat. What happens when your body sees a threat is it immediately, automatically, mobilizes energy to flee or fight," Elliot said.

This reaction, the researchers speculate, is an evolved response. In great apes, for example, the alpha males are red in color. Other apes see the alpha males as a threat and thus keep their distance. Humans haven't lost this tendency, he explained.

So, what's this have to do with golf and other sports? The current research, Elliot noted, indicates that "seeing red immediately and very quickly in a short time period does make you stronger. But I don't think it lasts. It is a very quick response."

At the most, the effect might help with something such as weightlifting where a brief burst of strength and speed is needed. Otherwise, the effect of red, which the research shows is real, is likely more in the head when it comes to sports.

In previous research, Elliot and colleagues have shown that seeing red on an opponent makes you think the opponent is more dominant and stronger and so you think the opponent is going to do better than you. They have also shown that wearing red makes you feel more dominant.

"In both ways, viewing it on others and thinking that you are wearing it yourself, red is a dominance and power cue that makes you feel that you are stronger and are going to do better in these physical contests," he said.

On Sundays in the noughties, a dominant Tiger Woods put on his red shirt, walked onto the golf course and a handful of hours later walked off with a trophy. He knew he was powerful, and so did the other golfers. 

But a red shirt isn't magic, Elliot noted, not even for Woods, whose is experiencing the biggest slump of his career.

"If he wears red now, where he is no longer that dominant, it is probably not going to have the same effect because it is not really true, it is not an accurate signal," Elliot said.

"I think there's got to be something behind the signal that is accurate if it is going to work. Tiger is out of luck right now."

More stories on the science of colors:

• Seeking Olympic Gold? Wear red 
• Condi Rice knows – winners wear red
• Different colors describe happiness, depression
• Domestication led to horse color explosion

Streeter Lecka / Getty Images file

Is there a scientific reason why the Duke Blue Devils are perennial basketball favorites? A professor from Duke says yes.

A professor from Duke University says it's only natural that the NCAA's March Madness basketball tournament highlights the same teams year after year ... like Duke, for instance.

This sounds like either an attempt to get in good with the higher-ups at the university in North Carolina, or one of those "duh, right" studies that merely confirm common sense. If your sports team builds up a reputation, of course it'll continue to attract good athletes and coaches to keep up that reputation — and that goes for the Duke Blue Devils as well as other sports dynasties.

But the point behind the newly published research from Adrian Bejan, an engineering professor at Duke (and a former basketball star from Romania), is that sports dynasties serve to illustrate evolution at work.

"The science of sports evolution is a significant step in evolutionary biology, where the accepted view is that evolution is impossible to observe because of its long timeframe," Bejan said in a news release. "With sports, we can focus on a particular population of athletes and witness 'live' the evolution of the design and performance of this selected group."

Bejan's analysis of hierarchies in basketball and academics was published online this week in the International Journal of Design and Nature and Ecodynamics."

Constructal law
Bejan says only a few sports teams can rise to the top of a hierarchy, and that hierarchy can be predicted in line with a theory that he calls "constructal law." The theory, which Bejan developed 15 years ago, is based on the principle that flow systems evolve their design to minimize imperfections, reduce friction or other forms of resistance, and increase their efficiency with time.

As a college basketball program becomes successful, the "friction" involved in recruiting those prospects is reduced. Less effort has to be expended to bring in the best athletes, and that solidifies the university's standing in the athletic hierarchy. The way Bejan explains it, this process is as natural as the fact that a river cuts a deeper channel as time goes on.

"In this case it has to do with the players," Perry Haynsworth, a former student of Bejan's who contributed to the study, told the Duke Chronicle. "The easiest path for these high-school basketball players to the NBA is to the top 10 schools, and because of that these top 10 schools have more success."

For the record, the top 11 schools listed in the paper are, in descending order, UCLA, North Carolina, Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, Louisville, Indiana, Michigan State, Michigan, Cincinnati and Ohio State (rankings based on NCAA Final Four appearances). This year's anticipated top seeds, as projected by Dave Ommen for NBC Sports' "Beyond the Arc" blog, don't exactly track that list. Duke, Kansas and Ohio State are the only teams from Bejan's list of 11 that are projected to be No. 1 or No. 2 seeds when the NCAA announces its brackets on March 13. But Bejan emphasizes that his study is about long-term trends rather than any one year in particular.

To be sure, Cinderella teams can break into the Final Four, and the top-rated teams can be upset as well. But Bejan and his colleagues say a college that wants to establish itself in basketball's top tier would have to spend more on its program and recruiting efforts than the existing top-tier teams. By the same token, the top teams tend to keep their reputation even if they have a bad year once in a while ... like Duke, for instance.

"The principle is that winning will return to a campus such as Duke because Duke is one of those channels of processing the best talent in the country," Bejan told the Duke Chronicle.

Academics and athletics
Bejan's analysis applies to academics as well as athletics, and he maintains that there's an evolutionary lesson in the way that colleges develop specialties. Universities, like species, have to balance the expenditure of resources for a variety of purposes. Some species have super-sharp hearing. Others rely more on their sense of smell or their sharp vision to survive. Similarly, some universities are better-known for academics than for athletics (Hooray for the Caltech Beavers!) while it's vice versa at some other universities I could name (but won't).

Some universities may show up on top-10 lists for athletics as well as athletics ... like Duke, for instance. But Bejan said "most of the universities appear only in one of the rankings — they seem to separate themselves into two different worlds." He maintains that academic powerhouses follow the same evolutionary rules that athletic powerhouses do.

This isn't the first time Bejan has blended athletics and evolution: In previously published research, he found that Olympic swimmers and sprinters have grown bigger, taller and faster over the past 100 years — recording an average growth rate that's almost three times as high as the wider population's average growth rate over the same time frame. More controversially, he has sought to explain why the top-rated sprinters tend to be black while the top-rated swimmers tend to be white. (He and his co-authors contend that it has to do with torso length, as measured by the position of the belly button.)

Do you think Bejan has hit the mark with his evolutionary analysis of March Madness, or has he thrown up an airball? Feel free to add your color commentary in the comment space below.

More about basketball and science:

• Bracketologists raise their game
• Inside the science of the NCAA bracket
• Why superathletes are a step ahead
• "Beyond the Arc" on NBCSports.com

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."