Smithsonian.com

The challenge is to figure out how all that wiring works. Image courtesy of Human Connectome Project

A year and a half into his presidency, John F. Kennedy challenged U.S. scientists to get Americans to the moon by the end of the decade. At his recent State of the Union address, Barack Obama hinted at what could become his version of reaching for the moon–he’d like scientists to solve the mystery of the brain.

Obama’s mission would be a heavier lift.

He didn’t go into much detail, other than citing brain research as a stellar example of how government can “invest in the best ideas.” But last week a story in the New York Times  by John Markoff filled in a lot of the blanks. Obama’s grand ambition is something called the Brain Activity Map–it’s already being referred to simply as BAM–and it would require a massive collaborative research effort involving neuroscientists, government agencies, private foundations and tech companies, with the truly daunting goal of figuring out how the brain actually generates thoughts, memories and consciousness.

An answer for Alzheimer’s?

The White House is expected to officially unveil its big plan as early as next month as part of its budget proposal. The speculation is that it could cost as much as $3 billion over the next 10 years.

Now, it may seem a strange time to be pitching projects with a $300 million-a-year price tag, what with the budget-hacking sequestration expected to kick in later this week. That’s why even though Obama was light on the details, he did make a point of comparing the brain-mapping mission to the Human Genome Project–a major research initiative financed by the federal government to map all of the genes in human DNA. It ultimately cost $3.8 billion, but it reached its goal two years early, in 2003, and through 2010, according to an impact study, returned $800 billion to the economy.

No question that BAM could have a profound impact in helping scientists understand what goes on in the brain to cause depression or schizophrenia or autism. And it certainly could be a boon to pharmaceutical companies that have spent billions, without luck, to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Since 1998, there have been more than 100 unsuccessful attempts to find a treatment for Alzheimer’s, which by 2050, is expected to affect 115 million people around the world.

It’s all about the tools

Clearly there are plenty of medical reasons to try to unravel the brain, but what, realistically, are the prospects? Sure, brain scans have helped scientists see which parts of the brain are more active during different types of behavior, but that’s a 30,000-foot view. It tells them next to nothing about how individual brain cells transmit information and even less about how neural networks transform that into behavior.

In recent years, researchers have made big strides in understanding how the brain is organized through the Human Connectome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health. But that’s designed to create more of a static map of neural connections.

The next crucial step is to be able to see, in real time, how information is processed through those connections and which different neurons become part of that process. Or as Harvard biologist George Church, one of the scientists who proposed BAM in a paper last year, has explained it: “We don’t just want to see the wires, but also the messages going over the wires.”

The key is how quickly technology can be developed that will allow scientists to follow a thought process by recording every blip of every one of the thousands, and possibly millions, of neurons involved. Current technology enables them to record the activity of roughly 100 neurons at a time, way too small a slice of the neural network to help explain much of anything. But, as Greg Miller noted in a recent piece on the Wired website, several cutting-edge biological or nano-tools are in the works, including one that could “pack hundreds of thousands of nanowire electrodes into flexible sheets that conform to the surface of the brain and eavesdrop on neurons with minimal tissue damage.”

Is bigger really better?

A lot of neuroscientists will be thrilled if BAM gets funded. But not all. Some have already pointed out that you really can’t compare it to the Human Genome Project, nor the mission to the moon, for that matter. Both of those endeavors, while very challenging, had clearly definable goals. But how do you identify success for BAM? Would being able to record the activity of hundreds of thousands of neurons really explain how thinking happens? No one really knows.

Other scientists are concerned that BAM, with its high profile, could drain dollars from other neuroscience research. Some writers have even raised the specter of mind control, particularly since one of the government agencies that would be involved is DARPA, the Defense Department’s agency that funds experimental technology.

Gary Marcus, writing in the The New Yorker, makes the case that a project like BAM might be more effective if it wasn’t so monolithic. He argues that it should be broken up into five smaller projects, each one focused on a different aspect of brain function.

But he also warns that should Congress balk at ponying up the money for a major neuroscience project, it runs the risk of sparking, ironically, a brain drain. In January, a group of European countries committed more than $1 billion to their own huge neuroscience endeavor called the Human Brain Project , which will try to simulate all the processes of a brain within a computer.

Writes Marcus:

“Whether it meets its grand goal or not, the European project will certainly lead to a significant number of smaller scientific advances. If the U.S. doesn’t follow suit, we will lose our lead in neuroscience, and will likely be left playing catch-up in some of the biggest game-changing industries on the horizon, like human-level artificial intelligence and direct brain-computer interfaces–even though both fields originated in the United States.”

Brain teasers

Here are some other recent findings from brain research:

• Of mice and men watching mice: Researchers at Stanford were able to follow the brain activity of mice in real time after lacing their brains with fluorescent proteins. They were able to watch which parts of their brains glowed as they ran around a cage.
• Does that mean a bird can get a song stuck in its head?: And a team of scientists at Duke University found that birds that can sing and mimic sounds have genes in their brains that can turn on and off in ways similar to human brains.
• She lights up a womb: For the first time, MRIs of developing human fetuses showed communication signals between different parts of their brains. Scientists at Wayne State University in Michigan hope their research will lead to early treatments for autism and ADHD.
• Nothing yet, though, on how foot gets in mouth: Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, had mapped the process of speech, laying out the neural network that makes it happen, from the nerves that control the jaws, lips and tongue to those that manipulate the larynx.
• Talk about a protein boost: There’s a biological explanation for why women talk more than men. Studies have shown that women speak an average of 20,000 words a day, while men average about 7,000. According to a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience last week, it may be because they tend to have higher levels of a protein in their brain that’s been linked to verbal communication.

Video bonus: A BBC journalist gets a tour of the wiring on his own brain.

More from Smithsonian.com

A More Human Artificial Brain

Brain Science: 10 Studies That Get Inside Your Head

Last week’s asteroid pass was the closest ever predicted. Computer graphic courtesy of NASA

Last Friday was, astronomically speaking, one of those days that comes along every 40 years.  Actually, a lot less frequently than that.  That’s how often, according to NASA estimates, an asteroid the size of the one that flew by Friday gets that close to hitting the Earth–it passed 17,000 miles away. But when you throw in the considerably smaller meteorite that exploded over Russia the same day and injured more than 1,000 people–that’s never happened before–you’re talking about one extremely unique moment in space rock history.

Most of us have moved on, taking comfort in the belief that that’s not happening again any time soon.  But there was something sobering about seeing how much damage could be done by rock about as big as one and and a half school buses. Also, that if the flyby asteroid, which was three times that size, had been on target to hit our planet, we really couldn’t have done much about it–the giant rock was spotted by a team of amateur astronomers in Spain only a year ago.

All of which prompted two basic questions: “How much warning will we get before a monster asteroid collides with the planet?” and “What’s the plan for stopping it?”

Beware of “city killers”

The good news is that NASA, which really didn’t start tracking near-Earth objects until the mid-1990s, believes it has charted almost 95 percent of the 980 asteroids more than a half-mile wide that are orbiting in our part of the universe. These are known as “planet-killers,” space rocks so large that if they collided with Earth, it would pretty much end civilization as we know it. None, I’m happy to say, are headed our way. 

But move down a bit in size to asteroids roughly between 100 feet and a half mile wide and it’s a very different story. NASA figures it’s located only 1 percent of the near-Earth objects that small. They may not sound very menacing, but keep in mind that the rock that missed us Friday was roughly 150 feet wide and it would have had a cataclysmic impact if it had exploded over or landed on a populated area. And the one that did blow apart over Russia and hurt so many people was only 55 feet wide.

Scientists at the University of Hawaii, with NASA funding, are developing a network of telescopes designed to find the smaller ones. It’s called ATLAS, which stands for the ominous-sounding Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System, and its creators say they’ll be able to provide a one-week warning of incoming ”city killers”–rocks about 150 wide–and three weeks notice of “county killers”–ones three times as large.

Seek and you shall find

The truth is, though, infrared telescopes surveying from space are better suited for the job, particularly when it comes to spotting asteroids orbiting close to the sun. NASA’s WISE telescope identified 130 near-Earth asteroids, but it’s been shut down for two years. Instead of replacing it, NASA is reviewing proposals for a sensor that could detect asteroids as small as 100 feet wide, while attached to a communications satellite.  

But now private groups have started floating their own ideas for finding rocks flying through space. One, called the B612 Foundation after the fantasy asteroid on which the Little Prince lived, has ambitious plans to launch a deep space telescope named Sentinel. From a vantage point as far away as Venus, it should be able to look back at our planet and see the heat signatures of objects that  come near the Earth’s orbit.  

It’s no small undertaking–the estimated cost is $450 million–but among those driving the project are two former astronauts, Russell Schweickart and Edward Lu, who’s now a Google executive and has been able to stir up interest for the mission in Silicon Valley. Lu sees last week’s double asteroid display as a wakeup call. Sure enough, his group was getting calls all day Friday from people wanting to know when it will have its telescope up. Most likely it won’t be until 2018.  

And two companies hoping to make a fortune by mining asteroids will also soon be in the business of tracking them. Planetary Resources, which includes among its investors filmmaker James Cameron, Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and X-Prize Foundation head Peter Diamandis, plans to launch its own asteroid-charting space telescope late next year. The other, Deep Space Industries, has proposed a kind of sentry line of spacecraft circling the Earth that would evaluate and, if necessary, intercept incoming asteroids. 

Taking care of business

Okay, but then what? Can an asteroid moving at 18,000 miles an hour be stopped, or at least steered away?  

Forget about the Armageddon approach. Blowing up an asteroid with a nuclear bomb–good for a movie, bad for Planet Earth. The resulting debris shower might do almost as much damage.

Instead, here are five ideas that have been proposed:  

1) A shout out to our old friend gravity: This would involve what’s referred to as a “gravity tractor.” Actually, it’s a large spaceship that would be maneuvered as close as possible to the orbiting asteroid. In theory, the gravitational pull of such a large object would be strong enough to change the asteroid’s path.  Unfortunately, some scientists say we might need a decade’s notice to pull this off.

2) Prepare for ramming speed!: The European Space Agency is working with scientists at Johns Hopkins University on a plan that would involve sending a spacecraft to bump an asteroid off course.  Called the Asteroid Impact and Deflection misson, or AIDA for short, it would actually involve sending up two spacecraft. One would be there to observe and gather data while the other does the ramming.  The goal would be to alter the asteroid’s spin and ultimately, its direction.

3) Okay, so there is a nuclear option: But it hopefully wouldn’t involve blowing up the asteroid to smithereens. Instead, scientists would prefer to detonate a device close enough that it would change the rock’s orbit.  This is always referred to as a last resort.

4) Would you like something in an eggshell? Or perhaps a tasteful pearl white?:  Then there’s the white paint strategy.  According to this plan, a spacecraft would approach the asteroid and pummel it with white paint balls.  The new white coat would more than double the rock’s reflectivity and, over time, that would, in theory, increase  solar radiation pressure enough to move it off  course. You scoff? This plan, devised by an MIT graduate student, won the 2012 Move an Asteroid Technical Paper Competition sponsored by the United Nations.

5) You knew there had to be lasers in here somewhere: And just in time for last week’s space rock event, two California scientists outlined a strategy in which they would use the sun’s power to create laser beams that could be aimed at an asteroid.  They would start small, creating an array in space about the size of the International Space Station.  The laser beams it created would be strong enough to push an asteroid on to a different path, say the plan’s inventors.  But they wouldn’t stop there.  They foresee building out the array until it’s as large as six miles wide. And then it would be able to produce laser beams powerful enough that , within a year, could vaporize an asteroid.

Sure, it sounds like a George Lucas fever dream.  But the scientists say it’s eminently feasible.  Besides, says one,  physicist Philip Lubin of  the University of California, Santa Barbara, it’s time to be proactive instead of reactive.  As he put it, “Duck and cover is not an option.”

Video bonus: In case you forgot how bad a movie Armageddon was, and that it featured Steve Buscemi as an astronaut, here’s the over-the-top trailer.

Video bonus bonus : Or if you want to stick to the real thing, here’s a collection of videos of Friday’s asteroid flyby.

More from Smithsonian. com

The Last Massive Exploding Meteor Hit Earth in 1908

To the Asteroids and Beyond

Scientists are still wrestling with how love works. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Hamed Masoumi

It should probably tell us something that the most frequently asked question on Google last year was “What is love?” Clearly, most of us are clueless on the matter; otherwise we wouldn’t be turning to algorithms for an explanation.

Which explains why scientific research on love continues unabated. We want answers.

So, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, here are 10 recent studies or surveys trying to make sense of matters of the heart.

1) You light up my brain: Researchers at Brown University in Rhode Island say that based on brain scans, they may be able to predict if a relationship will last. The scientists did MRIs on 12 people who said they were passionately in love, then repeated the process three years later. In the six people whose relationships lasted, the scans showed that the part of the brain that produces emotional responses to visual beauty was particularly active when they were shown a picture of their partners. But those same six had lower levels of activity in the pleasure center of the brain tied to addiction when they looked at the photo.

2) Yeah, but what did it do for their sinuses?: Scientists continue to ponder the effect of oxytocin, the so-called “love hormone” produced by the pituitary gland. One of more recent studies, at the University of Zurich, found that while men generally withdraw during conflict with their mates, those who inhaled an oxytocin nasal spray smiled more, made eye contact and generally communicated better during disagreements.

3) What you see is what you don’t get: A new study by sociologist Elizabeth McClintock at the University of Notre Dame concluded that highly attractive women are more likely to seek exclusive relationships than purely sexual ones, and also that, for women, the number of sexual partners decreases as their physical attractiveness increases.

4) Okay, now let’s try a salsa beat: Meanwhile, at the University of California, Davis, scientists studying the physical behavior of couples in relationships found that when they were sitting near each other–but without speaking or touching–their breathing patterns and heartbeats often matched up. The researchers also discovered that the women tended to adjust their behavior to their partners more often.

5) So yes, putting the toilet seat down is an act of love: A professor at the University of Rochester who’s been studying newlywed couples for the past several years says members of married couples who do small acts of compassion and thoughtfulness for each other usually have happier relationships. Researchers Harry Reis also found that men more often said that they had put their partner’s wishes ahead of their own.

6) As they say in the relationships biz, it’s complicated: According to a study soon to be published in the journal Psychological Science, people like to believe that their way of life–whether they’re single or in a couple–is the best choice for everyone. The researchers also found that when it came to Valentine’s Day, people believed that their friends would be happier if they were in the same situation as they were–in other words, people in a couple thought their single friends would enjoy themselves more on Valentine’s Day if they were in a relationship, while singles thought their coupled friends would have a better time if they were single.

7) Thanks for not sharing: And apparently it’s not such a good idea to make big displays of affection on Facebook. So say researchers at the University of Kansas who discovered that people don’t like their partners sharing their feelings about their relationships with the Facebook universe. Participants in the study said they felt less intimacy with their partners if they went public with how they felt about their loved one.

8) Another reason not to do windows: Here’s one to stir up debate. According to a research team of American and Spanish scientists, men who share in the housework have sex with their wives less often than men in “traditional” marriages where the women handle all of the household chores. This runs counter to previous studies which concluded that married men had more sex in exchange for helping around the house. In the recent study, married couples reported having more sex if the women did the cooking, cleaning and shopping and the men did the gardening, electrics and plumbing, took car of the car and paid the bills.

9) Road trip!: A survey of more than 1,000 American adults found that couples that travel together have better sexual relationships than those that don’t. Almost two-thirds of those surveyed recently by the U.S. Travel Association said that a weekend vacation was more likely to spark up their relationship than a gift. And almost 30 percent said their sex life actually improved after traveling together.

10) Which is why you don’t take dogs on vacations: On the other hand, dogs may not be so good for your sex life. About 73 percent of dog owners who answered another survey said their pets get jealous when they show physical affection toward their partners. And it probably doesn’t help that almost as many of those surveyed said their dog sleeps with them in bed.

Video bonus: It’s really not that hard to write a bad love song. The Axis of Awesome lays it all out for you.

Also on Smithsonian.com

The Science of Love

Biology’s 10 Worst Love Stories

Can drones be taught the rules of war? Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense

When John Brennan, President Obama’s choice to be the next head of the CIA, appeared before a Senate committee yesterday, one question supplanted all others at his confirmation hearing:

How are the decisions made to send killer drones after suspected terrorists?

The how and, for that matter, the why of ordering specific drone strikes remains largely a mystery, but at least one thing is clear–the decisions are being made by humans who, one would hope, wrestle with the thought of sending a deadly missile into an occupied building.

But what if humans weren’t involved? What if one day life-or-death decisions were left up to machines equipped with loads of data, but also a sense of right and wrong?

Moral quandary

That’s not so far fetched. It’s not going to happen any time soon, but there’s no question that as machines become more intelligent and more autonomous, a pivotal part of their transformation will be the ability to learn morality.

In fact, that may not be so far away. Gary Marcus, writing recently in The New Yorker, presented the scenario of one of Google’s driverless cars before forced to make a split-second decision: “Your car is speeding along a bridge at 50 miles per hour when errant school bus carrying 40 innocent children crosses its path. Should your car swerve, possibly risking the life of its owner (you), in order to save the children, or keep going, putting all 40 kids at risk? If the decision must be made in milliseconds, the computer will have to make the call.”

And what about robotic weapons or soldiers? Would a drone be able to learn not to fire on a house if it knew innocent civilians were also inside? Could machines be taught to follow the international rules of war?

Ronald Arkin, a computer science professor and robotics expert at Georgia Tech, certainly thinks so. He’s been developing software, referred to as an “ethical governor,” which would make machines capable of deciding when it’s appropriate to fire and when it’s not.

Arkin acknowledges that this could still be decades away, but he believes that robots might one day be both physically and ethically superior to human soldiers, not vulnerable to the emotional trauma of combat or desires for revenge. He doesn’t envision an all-robot army, but one in which machines serve with humans, doing high-risk jobs full of stressful snap decisions, such as clearing buildings.

Beware of killer robots

But others feel it’s time to squash this type of thinking before it goes too far. Late last year, Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Clinic issued a report, “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots,” which, true to its title, called on governments to ban all autonomous weapons because they would “increase the risk of death or injury to civilians during armed conflict.”

At about the same a time, a group of Cambridge University professors announced plans to launch what they call the Center for the Study of Existential Risk. When it opens later this year, it will push for serious scientific research into what could happen if and when machines get smarter than us.

The danger, says Huw Price, one of the Center’s co-founders, is that one day we could be dealing with “machines that are not malicious, but machines whose interests don’t include us”.

The art of deception

Shades of Skynet, the rogue artificial intelligence system that spawned a cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator movies. Maybe this will always be the stuff of science fiction.

But consider other research Ronald Arkin is now doing as part of projects funded by the Department of Defense. He and colleagues have been studying how animals deceive one another, with the goal of teaching robots the art of deception.

For instance, they’ve been working on programming robots so that they can, if necessary, feign strength as animals often do. And they’ve been looking at teaching machines to mimic the behavior of creatures like the eastern gray squirrel. Squirrels hide their nuts from other animals, and when other squirrels or predators appear, the gray squirrels will sometimes visit places where they used to hide nuts to throw their competitors off the track. Robots programmed to follow a similar strategy have been able to confuse and slow down competitors.

It’s all in the interest, says Arkin, of developing machines that won’t be a threat to humans, but rather an asset, particularly in the ugly chaos of war. The key is to start focusing now on setting guidelines for appropriate robot behavior.

“When you start opening that Pandora’s Box, what should be done with this new capability?,” he said in a recent interview. “I believe that there is a potential for non-combatant casualties to be lessened by these intelligent robots, but we do have to be very careful about how they’re used and not just release them into the battlefield without appropriate concern.”

To believe New Yorker writer Gary Marcus, ethically advanced machines offer great potential beyond the battlefield.

The thought that haunts me the most is that that human ethics themselves are only a work-in-progress. We still confront situations for which we don’t have well-developed codes (e.g., in the case of assisted suicide) and need not look far into the past to find cases where our own codes were dubious, or worse (e.g., laws that permitted slavery and segregation).

What we really want are machines that can go a step further, endowed not only with the soundest codes of ethics that our best contemporary philosophers can devise, but also with the possibility of machines making their own moral progress, bringing them past our own limited early-twenty-first century idea of morality.”

Machines march on

Here are more recent robot developments:

• Hmmmm, ethical and sneaky: Researchers in Australia have developed a robot that can sneak around by moving only when there’s enough background noise to cover up its sound.
• What’s that buzzing sound?: British soldiers in Afghanistan have started using surveillance drones that can fit in the palms of their hands. Called the Black Hornet Nano, the little robot is only four inches long, but has a spy camera and can fly for 30 minutes on a full charge.
• Scratching the surface: NASA is developing a robot called RASSOR that weighs only 100 pounds, but will be able to mine minerals on the moon and other planets. It can move around on rough terrain and even over bolders by propping itself up on its arms.
• Ah, lust: And here’s an early Valentine’s Day story. Scientists at the University of Tokyo used a male moth to drive a robot. Actually, they used its mating movements to direct the device toward an object scented with female moth pheromones.

Video bonus: So you’re just not sure you could operate a 13-foot tall robot? No problem. Here’s a nifty demo that shows you how easy it can be. A happy model even shows you how to operate the “Smile Shot” feature. You smile, it fires BBs. How hard is that?

More from Smithsonian.com

This Robot Is a Better Dad Than Your Dad

Robots Get the Human Touch

At football stadiums today, it’s all about the screens. Photo courtesy of Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision

It’s the time of year when the National Football League gets a little bit smaller.

Sure, the Super Bowl on Sunday is its championship game and more than 100 million people will be watching, but if the outcome isn’t decided in the last two minutes, more people on Monday will be talking about the funniest TV commercials or how Beyonce sang–or didn’t–at halftime or the post-game homage to the Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Lewis as he dances off into the sunset.

It’s been this way for a while now. As the spectacle of everything around it has become bigger, what actually happens on the field during the Super Bowl has gotten smaller. And that’s been okay with the league as long as it’s only happened once a year.

But now, with the rise of giant home video screens and the ability to see every scoring play of every game on the NFL’s RedZone network or watch games from different angles on a computer tablet, people running the league and its teams have realized that they need to pump up the stadium experience. What happens on the field, they fear, soon may no longer be enough to keep the customers satisfied.

Hitting the big, big screen

No question that the Dallas Cowboys ratcheted things up in 2009 when they opened, with much hoopla, the new Cowboys Stadium. Not only did it cost more than $1 billion, but hanging 90 feet above the field is an HDTV screen so large–it stretches from 20-yard-line to 20-yard line–that players who are quite massive in real life look like little Lego men moving around below.

Next fall, the Houston Texans will one-up the Cowboys when they unveil their own field-dwarfing video screen, almost 25 percent larger than the one in Dallas. And now even colleges are starting to join the monster screen club. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, hardly a football powerhouse, just released plans for a new stadium that will include a video screen 100 yards long.

That’s right, it will be as long as the playing field.

Stand up and cheer

Okay, so we can expect the screens to get bigger and bigger. But some think the stadiums may actually get smaller, or at least there will be fewer seats. Instead, more attention will be paid to where people can stand and what they can do while they’re there.

Here’s how Eric Grubman, the NFL’s executive vice president of business operations, described a football stadium of the future in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times:

“What if a new stadium we built wasn’t 70,000, but it was 40,000 seats with 20,000 standing room? But the standing room was in a bar-type environment with three sides of screens, and one side where you see the field. Completely connected. And in those three sides of screens, you not only got every piece of NFL content, including replays, RedZone and analysis, but you got every other piece of news and sports content that you would like to have if you were at home.

Now you have the game, the bar and social setting, and you have the content. What’s that ticket worth? What’s that environment feel like to a young person? Where do you want to be? Do you want to be in that seat, or do you want to be in that pavilion?”

Phoning it in

Other stadium innovations are heading in a different direction. Instead of having the game be only part of a multi-screen, sports bar party experience, they would entertain fans by allowing them to immerse themselves more deeply into the game itself. And they would do it all on smart phones and tablets.

Take the case of the New England Patriots. At the beginning of this past season, they became the first NFL team to deploy a free Wi-Fi network for streaming video in their home field, Gillette Stadium. Fans were able to use mobile apps to watch instant replays on their phones and get real time stats.

And next season, they’ll have more options, ones that take them into the games within the game. There will be apps that allow them to tune into cameras following star players around, apps that let them watch what goes on in their team’s locker room at halftime, apps that listen in on players wearing microphones and eavesdrop on conversations between the coaches and the quarterback (with a 15-second delay, of course).

And there will an app that, by the fourth quarter, could be the most valuable of all. It will tell them where to find the shortest bathroom lines.

Wearing protection

Here are other recent advances in football tech:

• A red zone you don’t want to enter: Reebok has developed something it calls a Head Impact Indicator. It’s a thin skullcap lined with sensors that can detect dangerous hits to the head. If a yellow or red light goes on, it’s time for a player to head to the sidelines.
• Now if they could only do something about helmet hair: Meanwhile, engineers at Purdue University say they’ve developed the model for a football helmet that disperses the energy of a smack to the head instead of just protecting a player’s skull. They report that tests with a polymer-lined Army helmet they designed showed it could reduce the G-force a player’s brain absorbed by as much as 50 percent.
• Like we need another reason to boo the refs: You know that imaginary yellow line you see on TV games to show where the first down marker is? After this season, the NFL is going to take a look at technology that would project a laser line across the field so people in the stadium could see what everyone at home has been seeing for years.
• Hardbodies the easy way: When they run out on the field Sunday, four San Francisco 49ers players, including both of the team’s quarterbacks, will be wearing a form of customized body armor under their uniforms. It’s called EvoShield and it’s a gel that hardens to fit a player’s body when exposed to air.

Video bonus: Okay, here’s a sneak peek of two Super Bowl ads already being declared winners, a spot about how getting the keys to the family Audi jacks up the testosterone of a boy headed to his high school prom, and a Volkswagen ad using a Minnesotan-turned-Rastafarian to celebrate the power of German engineering.

More from Smithsonian.com

How Did Avocados Become the Official Super Bowl Food?

The Super Bowl’s Love Affair With Jet Packs