Brain injuries are incredibly serious, but can be incredibly hard to diagnose in the heat of battle—or, say, a game. This is a grave issue that has plagued all sports—amateur and professional—but none so visibly as football. Earlier this year, a Philadelphia judge approved a plan that will see the National Football League pay out an estimated $1 billion to about 6,000 retired football players currently suffering from serious concussion-related diseases, like Alzheimer’s and dementia.
And a new Will Smith vehicle, to be released in December, is set to bring even more national attention to football brain injuries. In Concussion, Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic neuropathologist who made the startling connection between football players, brain injuries, and their long-term effects.
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Whether the NFL is serious about tackling its brain injury problem is up for debate. But a new color-changing crystal created by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania could at least make serious concussions easier to detect. That might give football players opportunities stop playing before a brain injury becomes even more serious.
The research team, led by chemist Shu Yang, used a technique called holographic lithography to carefully engineer crystals of a specific color. Once a large force is applied to those crystals, however, their structures change, giving them a different hue.
What does all this complex science have to do with football? Yang’s team found it could incorporate those crystals into a polymer, which could then be molded into your standard football helmet.
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“If the force was large enough, and you could easily tell that, then you could immediately seek medical attention,” Yang told phys.org about a potential color-changing helmet.
Yang cautions that right now, the crystal-making process is an extremely expensive one, and not yet viable for mass production. But the advances are great news in a country that has become increasingly obsessed with football—but also increasingly worried about its health consequences.
Via USA Today
