Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo., Aug. 16) – Olympic sprinter Shaunae Miller’s dive across the finish line was reminiscent of a baseball player sliding head first into a base. Conventional baseball wisdom mostly holds that sliding head first into first base is slower than running through the bag, but Alan Nathan, a physics professor at Illinois and one of the foremost researchers in the field, has said that sliding into first base can be just as fast as running – if done with perfect timing and technique.