Brains are Jello, and Other Things We’re Finally Figuring Out
The Jello Problem
You know that feeling when you stop a car too fast and your coffee sloshes over the rim? That’s basically your brain inside your skull during a tackle.
I’ve been listening to Science Magazine Podcast for years—decades, maybe?—and they usually keep things pretty high-level. But this week’s episode (Feb 5, 2026) got visceral. Fast.
We started with football. American football, specifically, and the absolute engineering nightmare that is trying to keep a human brain from turning into scrambled eggs during a collision. Staff writer Adrian Cho dropped a visual that I can’t unsee: he compared the brain to a Jello mold. You can squeeze Jello, and it holds up okay (it’s incompressible, mostly water). But if you twist it? It shears. It tears.
That’s the rotation problem.
For the longest time—basically since the leather helmet days—we’ve been treating helmets like hard shells designed to prevent skull fractures. Mission accomplished, mostly. But concussions? That’s a whole different beast involving rotational acceleration.
Crumple Zones for Your Face
What I loved about this segment was the sheer nerdery of the solution. We aren't just stuffing foam into plastic buckets anymore. We’re talking:
- Variable stiffness: Shells that bend like car bumpers.
- 3D-printed lattices: These wild internal structures that collapse in stages—like a controlled demolition of a building—to buy the brain milliseconds of deceleration time.
- The Virginia Tech Pendulum: A testing rig that bashes helmets in four places at three speeds.
It’s data-driven design. Finally. And it’s working—concussions are down about 35% from their 2017 peak. Although, as Cho points out (and I appreciate the skepticism here), it’s hard to tell how much of that is the fancy new helmets and how much is just banning stupid dangerous practices like the "Oklahoma drill."
Golden Nugget: "Armor is only for the people who should be wearing armor... if you're a normal person and you put on a football helmet, you might very well have this sort of initial reaction... like, hey, this thing is kind of dangerous."
The Pivot to the Uncomfortable
Then, the episode takes a hard left turn.
We go from the physics of the gridiron to the biology of death. Not addiction—death.
Sarah Cressby interviews researcher John Strang, and he points out a massive blind spot in our science. We have spent billions studying the behavior of addiction (how people get hooked, public health policies, rehab), but we have almost zero clue about the biological mechanics of the final moments of an overdose.
Why does the breathing center shut down? Why do some people gasp and wake up, while others slip into silence?
Strang calls it the "undone science."
It’s grim stuff. But he argues—persuasively—that we’re too squeamish to study it. We have "heroin overdose laboratories" in the UK now (yes, that’s a real thing) where they monitor active users taking their usual dose to see what happens to their respiratory drive.
It sounds ethically gray, right? It feels uncomfortable. But Strang makes the point that we study cancer progression in patients who already have cancer. We don't ignore the mechanism just because the disease is tragic.
The Signal in the Noise
The connection between these two wildly different segments? Sensors.
In football, we’re putting accelerometers in mouthguards to measure the hit. In the opioid crisis, Strang wants to see wearables that detect when a user’s rib cage stops moving—an apnea alarm that could trigger a response before it’s too late.
It’s a reminder that sometimes the solution isn't a new drug or a new rule. Sometimes, it’s just better data collection in the moments that matter most.
Whether that moment is a linebacker hitting a quarterback, or a quiet room where someone has just stopped breathing.
Heavy episode. Worth your time.
Listen to Science Magazine Podcast: https://podranker.com/podcast/science-magazine-podcast