On Sunday the National Football League holds its championship game, Super Bowl XLIV. It will be the first Super Bowl since the league acknowledged the link between mild head trauma--often caused by the game's rough style of play--and long-term brain damage, and overhauled its policies toward concussions. As many football fans may have noticed, players this season were more likely to remain on the bench than return to the field after a blow to the head, thanks to new rules forbidding them from playing after showing significant signs of concussion.

That change has been a long time coming, writes Deborah Blum in an Op-Ed today in The New York Times. While brain injury in football players has seen a growing emphasis in recent years--both in the media and in Congress--strong evidence for the link has been around for more than 80 years. In the piece, Blum describes a paper published in The Journal of the American Medical Association on October 13, 1928. "This raises the question--at least for me--as to why we are announcing the athlete concussion-dementia link as a new, and still somewhat debatable, issue some 80 years later," she writes.

In that study, performed by Dr. Harrison Martland, chief medical examiner in Essex, NJ,

Martland did autopsies on more than 300 people who had died of head injuries, looking for patterns of brain damage. For his study of boxers, he talked a fight promoter into giving him a list of 23 former fighters he thought could be labeled as definitely punch drunk. Martland was able to track down only 10 of the former athletes, but in those cases, he found the promoter's diagnosis was on target. Four were in asylums, suffering from dementia. Two had difficulty forming sentences or responding to questions. One was almost blind, two had trouble walking and one had developed symptoms similar to those of Parkinson's disease.

More recently,

Surveys done in the last few years have found that N.F.L. players are at higher risk of dementias and other mental disorders than the general population. Autopsies of athletes -- notably the brains of former N.F.L. players who suffered from profound dementias -- consistently found dark clusters of nerve cell proteins, formations more common to elderly Alzheimer's patients. Similar patterns of damage were recently reported in wrestlers and soccer players. Most of these athletes were dead by age 50."

...At a Congressional hearing on football brain injuries, held in Houston on Monday, legislators accused college athletic officials of ignoring risks and failing to adopt polices that sufficiently protected young players. "It's money, money, money," said Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, "and health care ought to be considered."

Researchers are working hard to develop better ways to study the problem, including helmets designed to detect concussions, which would alert players or coaches when they need to be benched, or even prevent them. And new ways to study mild traumatic brain injury, which doesn't show up in traditional brain scans.

Want to drop a few pounds on your next vacation? Head for the mountains, the taller the better.

Researchers from Germany studied 20 obese men both at low altitude in Munich and while spending a week at 8700 feet, in a field station near the peak of Germany's highest mountain, Zugspitze. Participants lost an average of two pounds that week and kept it off for the next month, without making any changes in diet or activity levels. During their high altitude stay, the men were given unrestricted access to food and restricted to short walks.

The researchers found that basal metabolism increased at high altitude, though it's not clear why. Levels of leptin, a hormone known to suppress hunger, also increased, perhaps in response to decreased oxygen. Participants ate less, even after symptoms of altitude sickness had disappeared. And they continued to eat less after returning to Munich, at least during the four week follow-up period of the study. The research was published this month in the journal Obesity.

Christopher Tarnovsky, who operates the California-based consulting firm Flylogic Engineering, must strike dread into the heart of anyone working on secure computer chips.

At the Black Hat DC, a computer-security conference in Washington, DC, Tarnovsky gave an impressive demonstration of how even the most secure system will fall under a sustained, determined attack.

Tarnovsky says that he spends almost every waking moment hacking chips. He even owns a focused ion beam work station--a secret weapon for chip hackers. Such a machine costs a quarter of a million dollars, used.

The target in Tarnovsky's demonstration was the family of chips used for trusted platform computing, and for controlling access to the Xbox 360, GSM SIM cards, and satellite television transmissions. After six months of intense work, Tarnovsky says he developed a technique that allows him to break one of these chips in a matter of hours.

That's not to say that the chip's security is poor. Tarnovsky speaks of its design with great respect. When he describes what he had to do to get into it, it's easy to see why: the device is loaded with encryption, dummy data, light sensors that destroy the chip if they detect a signal, and a complex coating of mesh that will also kill the chip if it's mishandled.

"It's a really nice design," Tarnovsky says, "but it's not as secure as they claim it is." This turns out to be the message he wants to get across. Since this chip is rated with extremely high security, Tarnovsky has identified improvements that he believes should be made to protect it further.

However, he acknowledges that few people have the skill and equipment needed to break the chip. In this case, announcing that he's broken the device won't mean a flood of copycat hackers. Instead, it just shows that nothing is invulnerable.