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Does playing football cause permanent brain damage? If it wasn’t already, that question is now squarely in the zeitgeist thanks to Hollywood and Will Smith.

The answer is not so straightforward, however. We are likely to learn a lot more about the subject in 2016 because so many labs are focused on concussion research right now. But scientists are only beginning to understand the details of how concussions—also a serious problem in the military—damage the brain. A better grasp of those details will help doctors get better at treating such injuries.

St. Louis Rams quarterback Case Keenum after taking a hard hit to the head during a game in November.

The past year featured dramatic announcements from scientists studying the relationship between concussions and brain damage. In September, researchers from the U.S Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University announced that they’d found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE—a recently discovered neurodegenerative disease that impairs cognition—in the brain tissue of 87 out of 91 former NFL players they studied. In December, researchers conducting an extensive brain imaging study at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center revealed that they’d observed “brain scars” in advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) exams of more than half of 834 soldiers who had been diagnosed with at least one mild traumatic brain injury, or concussion (see “Brain Scars Detected in Concussions”).

Findings like these deserve attention but should be taken with a grain of salt. Many of the former NFL players who donated their brains suspected they had a problem, so the results of that study don’t confirm the overall prevalence of the disease in football. And researchers don’t yet have enough data to understand the medical significance of the abnormalities revealed by the advanced MRI exams on soldiers.

There are crucial unanswered questions about how and why CTE arises. What are the most important risk factors for the disease? Are some people more prone to concussions, long-term damage, or both? Do specific kinds of trauma, or traumas to specific parts of the brain, carry more long-term risk? What exactly is at stake if a player or soldier returns to the field too early?

The good news is that funding for concussion-related research is surging, thanks in large part to the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense, and researchers will no doubt make progress toward answering those questions in 2016. And certain research efforts could soon lead to crucial new technologies for detecting and evaluating concussions.

Researchers are “on the cusp of a revolution” in which blood tests and new imaging techniques will make it possible to diagnose traumatic brain injury noninvasively, Ronald Hayes, cofounder and chief science officer of Banyan Biomarkers, told me earlier this year. Banyan, which is in the midst of a clinical trial involving 2,000 people, is seeking FDA approval of a blood test doctors could use to rule out the need for a CT scan, which exposes the patient to radiation. Hayes says the test could also potentially be used to diagnose concussions in the battlefield or on the sidelines (see “Two Companies Close in on a Concussion Blood Test”).

Meanwhile, researchers are scrambling to find new ways to detect concussion-related brain damage using advanced MRI and other imaging techniques. Recent results suggest that CT scans and conventional MRI exams could be missing clues that might help doctors better assess the severity of a brain injury and the risk of long-term complications. Gerard Riedy, a neuroradiologist at Walter Reed who is leading the largest-ever imaging study of traumatic brain injury in the military, says his group is on track to deliver recommendations on the use of advanced imaging techniques to the Defense Department by the fall of 2016. There are also large imaging studies going on in the civilian world, including a project at the University of California, San Francisco, that has enrolled 1,200 patients.

More detailed imaging data can be combined with blood test results and information about symptoms and long-term outcomes to help scientists develop a more quantitative understanding of the variations of concussion, the resulting symptoms, and the risk of lasting issues. Further down the road, doctors may be able to use some combination of blood tests and imaging to more precisely evaluate injuries and monitor recovery.

Finally, it’s worth asking: is a concussion pill a possibility? Just maybe. An experimental therapy reversed concussion-related brain damage in mice, according to a report Harvard scientists published in July (see “Will Football Players Someday Take a Concussion Pill?”). Kun Ping Lu, a professor of medicine who led the research, thinks the therapy, which is based on antibodies for a harmful protein that accumulates shortly after a concussion, could someday be turned into a drug for humans. In the near term, his group is pursuing a blood test.

We collected the most mesmerizing short clips about emerging technology from MIT Technology Review stories during 2015.

• By Antonio Regalado on December 30, 2015

The first 3-D printer able to squirt molten glass through a nozzle (read more)

A device keeps hearts alive and beating outside the body (read more)

VR headset lets man inhabit teddy bear (read more)

Single human cells captured in bubbles for genomic analysis (read more)

A bricklaying robot works three times as fast as a human (read more)

Scary humanoid robots that just fall over (read more)

The Falcon 9 rocket lands on its launchpad (read more)

By studying the network of links between Indian recipes, computer scientists have discovered that the presence of certain spices makes a meal much less likely to contain ingredients with flavors in common. From February …

The food pairing hypothesis is the idea that ingredients that share the same flavors ought to combine well in recipes. For example, the English chef Heston Blumenthal discovered that white chocolate and caviar share many flavors and turn out to be a good combination. Other unusual combinations that seem to confirm the hypothesis include strawberries and peas, asparagus and butter, and chocolate and blue cheese.

But in recent years researchers have begun to question how well this hypothesis holds in different cuisines. For example, food pairing seems to be common in North American and Western European cuisines but absent in cuisines from southern Europe and East Asia.

Today, Anupam Jain and pals at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur say the opposite effect occurs in Indian cuisine. In this part of the world, foods with common flavors are less likely to appear together in the same recipe. And the presence of certain spices make the negative food pairing effect even stronger.

Continued

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday defended his company's downsized version of the Internet, called "Free Basics," which is offered in developing nations around the world.

"In every society, there are certain basic services that are so important for people's wellbeing that we expect everyone to be able to access them freely," he wrote in the Times of India, citing public libraries, hospitals and schools as examples.

"That's why everyone also deserves access to free basic Internet services," Zuckerberg added.

Net Neutrality Trade-Off

Facebook launched Free Basics, a set of basic Internet services that is offered in more than 30 countries and has garnered some 15 million users over the last year, because everyone should have access to basic Internet services, he maintained.

However, the service has come under some criticism, especially in India, where last week the country's telecommunications industry regulator asked the mobile network set to partner with Facebook on Free Basics to put its efforts on hold.

Among the criticisms of Free Basics is that it stifles innovation by limiting choice, undermines net neutrality by favoring some content providers over others and confines users within a walled garden.

There is a trade-off between net neutrality and allowing more people to access the Internet, acknowledged Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research.

"There's no doubt the plan is non-neutral, but it does get more people online," he told TechNewsWorld.

"Facebook would argue that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, but the objection here is that many people's first experience with the Internet will be Facebook-flavored, which gives the company an unfair advantage," Dawson continued.

Marketing Initiative

Although Free Basics has introduced millions of new users to the Internet, doubts linger about Facebook's intentions.

"There's a suspicion that Facebook has ulterior motives," said Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner.

"They're in the business of making money," he told TechNewsWorld. "They'll have to do that to pay for this, and they haven't come out and said how that's going to work in the long term."

"My assumption with Mark Zuckerberg is everything he does is a marketing initiative," said John Carroll, a mass communications professor at Boston University.

"If there's some kind of side benefit for other people, that's fine with him," he told TechNewsWorld.

Facebook as Internet

Zuckerberg is all about collecting information and then selling it to marketers, Carroll noted.

"This is a market he's looking at -- the undeveloped world -- that he can gather up and do the same thing with them that he'd done with the other billion Facebook users," he said.

By creating a walled garden, Free Basics advances one of Zuckerberg's goals for Facebook. "One of Zuckerberg's objectives has long been for Facebook to be the Internet for people," Carroll noted.

"What he wants to do is preempt movement away from Facebook to other apps and other platforms and contain users as much as possible within the Facebook walls," he said.

"With Free Basics, he's going to bring in certain content providers that he picks and chooses. In that way, he creates the entire environment of digital media for all these people who wouldn't otherwise have access," Carroll continued.

Springboard to Wider Net

Free Basics is a springboard to the Internet for users, Zuckerberg argued.

"Half the people who use Free Basics to go online for the first time pay to access the full Internet within 30 days," he wrote.

There is one thing, though, that even Zuckerberg's critics would agree with him about.

"Internet access has become a critical differentiator in terms of societal development and competitiveness," Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research, told TechNewsWorld.

It also can affect the lives of individuals.

"Lack of access to the Internet can have a negative impact on things people are trying to do to improve their lives in meaningful ways," Aaron Smith, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center, told TechNewsWorld.

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John Mello is a freelance technology writer and contributor to Chief Security Officer magazine. You can connect with him on Google+.

Peer-to-peer energy trading is cropping up in several markets, including the United States.

• By Richard Martin on December 29, 2015

The German company Sonnenbatterie has launched a trading platform for distributed renewable energy by offering a way for owners of small solar and wind generation capacity to buy and sell power across the utility grid.

The trading system, which will launch in early 2016, is available via subscription to anyone on the German grid. The system will give solar owners an alternative revenue stream when they produce more power than they can use, but the company’s ambition is to establish a virtual alternative to the utility grid. Sonnenbatterie CEO Boris von Bormann calls it the “Airbnb of energy,” with community members trading energy as their needs and grid conditions warrant.

Sonnenbatterie’s platform joins a handful of other programs for trading distributed energy. The Dutch platform Vandebron, for example, has more than 38,000 subscribers. Consumers pay a monthly fee to contract directly with suppliers of clean energy for a set amount of power over a set amount of time. Consumers get to choose their specific energy supplier; producers get to name their price.

Likewise, the U.K.’s Open Utility pairs consumers with producers; in this case, however, it works only with business users. And in the United States, Boston-based Yeloha matches consumers with owners who sell a portion of the power produced by their solar panels to Yeloha subscribers. As with the other systems, the power is fed onto the electricity grid, and the platform provider works with the utility to track and credit the clean energy to both providers and consumers.

Unlike these systems, which connect consumers with producers, Sonnenbatterie’s platform allows members to both purchase and sell electricity—and it will incorporate battery storage, enabling suppliers to store energy from intermittent assets and sell it when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing.

Offering an easy and efficient way to store, purchase, and transfer electricity from small, renewable generators using the existing utility grid, such trading systems have the potential to solve many of the challenges associated with integrating intermittent, distributed resources onto the grid—and to accelerate the adoption of renewable energy by giving owners a way to make money from electricity they produce but cannot consume.

When members produce more energy than they can use from their solar arrays (or small wind turbines), the trading software combines it into the pool of available energy from which community members with power shortfalls can draw. Consumers pay the generators 25 cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s less than consumers pay for power in Germany, which has expensive electricity, but more than Germany’s feed-in tariff pays owners of distributed generation to send that power back onto the grid.

While the Sonnenbatterie system uses a set price, other platforms allow producers to name their price and purchasers to decide what they’re willing to pay. A market-based system that sets the price of electricity based on supply and demand could avoid the problems of net metering (the policy of compensating distributed generators at retail electricity prices for the power they feed back onto the grid). A distributed trading system would give customers the ability to simply sell their power to the highest bidder.

A more secure type of encryption will soon be required to protect Internet users’ data, but older devices don’t support it.

• By Signe Brewster on December 29, 2015

Fearing the loss of Internet users in some of the world’s poorest and most oppressed regions, technology providers Facebook and CloudFlare are calling for a gentler shift to a new Web encryption standard that will protect everything from social media websites to online transactions.

Beginning on January 1, browsers will begin blocking access to websites that use what’s known as the SHA-1 algorithm, with the goal of replacing it with its successor, SHA-2, by 2017. Facebook and CloudFlare, which provides security and speedy connections for Web pages, would like to allow users with SHA-2-incompatible devices to continue using SHA-1, while still sunsetting SHA-1 for the rest of the world.

When Internet users browse an encrypted website, the two-way exchange of information is protected in part by an encryption tool called a hash function. These algorithms turn any message into a unique jumble of letters and numbers that assures the information came from the right source. If you see “https” in your URL, the website you are visiting may use SHA-1. It’s these sites that will begin to be blocked from a small population of Web users later this week.

Since the mid-1990s, two hash functions have been the primary protectors of consumers’ browsers. As computing power drops in cost, the ease with which the tools can be cracked has grown. The second one, called the MD5 algorithm, was retired in 2008 after researchers exposed serious security flaws. The cost to spoof an SHA-1 hash function today is estimated to be around $100,000—a number that will continue to drop.

“People have sort of said, ‘Hey we’ve seen this movie before,’ and we know what is potentially coming and the risk is getting higher and higher,” CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince says.

The most effective solution is to replace SHA-1 with the more sophisticated SHA-2. But while MD5 and SHA-1 have been compatible with consumer devices from the start, SHA-2 was released in 2001. People with old devices—predominantly low-cost feature phones used in developing nations in Asia and Africa—could be cut off from access to encrypted websites and not have the resources to upgrade. CloudFlare estimates 6.08 percent of browsers in China do not have support for SHA-2. In Syria, it’s 3.63 percent.

Richard Barnes, the head of Firefox security at Mozilla, says the company has found only 3 percent of the Web still supports SHA-1.

“Interrupting these users’ experiences is actually good for the Web,” Barnes says. “Using old software is dangerous; in addition to requiring broken cryptography, old software usually has other security problems that have been fixed in more current versions.”

If there is any reason to continue supporting SHA-1, it’s so users have time to download new software that supports the upgrade, Barnes says. Firefox actually switched off SHA-1 support last year, but then reinstated it after noticing a huge drop in Firefox downloads. People with older browsers couldn’t connect to mozilla.org to download the new SHA-2 compatible software.

As computing costs continue to drop, SHA-2 will eventually become weak and necessary to replace. Many current devices do not support SHA-3. Technology like quantum computing could suddenly make the whole line of algorithms instantly breakable.

“This is an exercise that we’re going to have to go through time and time and time again,” Prince says. “Putting in place a mechanism to responsibly support the past while migrating to the future is a good thing and will make that migration much easier.”

Welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that burrows through the mountains of discarded wrapping paper to search out the best and brightest of the latest gadget announcements.

In our festive holiday edition, we take a look at connected socks with a Netflix focus, a hoverboard with a short flight time, and a robot vacuum cleaner that's also a home security system.

As always, these are not reviews, and the ratings reflect only how much I'd like to use each item. And, before I forget, I hope you're enjoying the holidays!

Netflix Socks

Finally, a pair of socks I would not be ever-so-slightly disappointed to find among my gifts on Christmas morning.

Netflix has released some designs for socks that can stop streaming the show or movie you're streaming if you should nod off. The socks detect when you've stopped moving for a long period and hit the pause button. When they're about to turn off your show, there's an LED light that flashes -- so if you're still awake, you can wiggle your big toe to halt the action.

Truly, there's little worse for streaming addicts than to miss a few episodes of a show or the end of a movie, potentially spoiling plot twists during the subsequent search to find their place.

I do wish Netflix saw enough of an opportunity here to sell the socks itself rather than posting the instructions for them online as a DIY project. The plans are somewhat complex for a complete novice at engineering (and knitting, if we're completely honest).

Then too, if you're someone who rolls around often in your sleep, there's a chance the socks won't detect your lack of consciousness and will fail to halt what you're streaming.

There's a lot of value here, though, especially for someone like myself, a heavy Netflix viewer. I just hope the socks are comfortable with all those electronics tucked in.

Rating: 5 out of 5 Are You Still Watchings?

Hover for a Moment

One of the hottest gifts this holiday season, by many accounts, is the hoverboard -- not one that actually levitates, but one that's essentially a self-balancing powered skateboard that you ride like a Segway. If you want an actual hoverboard, you'll need to dig deep.

We've seen conceptual hoverboards that use magnets to "levitate," but ARCA Space Corporation offers one that stays in the air. The US$19,900 ArcaBoard has 36 fans that output 272 horsepower to keep you afloat.

However, your ride ends in just 6 minutes, when the ArcaBoard needs a recharge, which takes six hours (unless you buy a US$4,500 accessory to reduce that to 35 minutes). The ride time drops to 3 minutes for heavier users, who will need a version of the system with extra thrust. You use a smartphone to steer, or you can disable it and use your body weight instead. Top speed is 12.5 miles per hour.

At its steep price point, the ArcaBoard doesn't offer enough return on investment.

However, I do think that eventually we'll have hoverboards that work for an extended period of time, with safety and elegance factored in. The future is coming, and it's one worth waiting for if it means we don't have to do something as prehistoric as use our legs to get around.

That said, I absolutely want to hop on one of these. I'd be crazy not to at least want to try out an actual working hoverboard.

Rating: 5 out of 5 Marty McFlys

Roaming 'Round the House

If you're a manufacturer and want your new robot vacuum cleaner to succeed, you have to bring something new to the table. LG is trying just that with the Hom-Bot Turbo+.

Along with functionality you'd expect as standard in a robot vacuum, it has an augmented-reality feature called "Home-Joy," which, like almost everything else these days, functions through a smartphone app.

When you aim your smartphone's camera at a certain area of your floor, Turbo+ will go to that spot and clean up. That is a much faster way of getting a robot vacuum to take care of a trouble spot, and I can see myself making great use of it when flour falls on the floor as I'm baking.

Thanks to the three onboard cameras, you can watch a cleaning cycle take place when you're not at home. Meanwhile, Turbo+ can operate as a security camera. If it detects movement when you're elsewhere, it can send you pictures from inside your house.

LG hasn't disclosed a price for Turbo+ as yet, because it's showcasing the system at CES 2016. Nevertheless, it's a robot vacuum with enough bells and whistles to help it stand out, and one that I'd like keeping an eye on my apartment when I'm away.

Rating: 4 out of 5 Farewells to Spills

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Kris Holt is a writer and editor based in Montreal. He has written for the Daily Dot, The Daily Beast, and PolicyMic, among others. He's Scottish, so would prefer if no one used the word "soccer" in his company. You can connect with Kris on Google+.