Kickstart: Taking a hit, collecting data

When the University of Wisconsin's football team faces off against Oklahoma State at the Guaranteed Rate Bowl in Phoenix Dec. 27, a group of researchers will be following numbers that aren't related to the final score.

The Badgers are part of a study involving the NFL and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health to use sensors embedded in mouth guards worn by the team to assess on-field injuries.

The high-tech mouthguard sensors "measure kinematic details such as impact speed, direction, force, location and severity of head impacts," the medical school said in a news release. "Insights gleaned from the data … will help inform the NFL's approach to injury reduction and decrease head impacts overall."

UW will also be able to use the data to keep its players safer.

NFL officials noted that UW and three other colleges involved in the study — the University of Alabama, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of Washington — are "direct pipelines" to professional football, which means players can be tracked over a longer period of time.

What does it mean to be a responsible company?

In its new list of "America's Most Responsible Companies 2023," Newsweek, working with research and data firm Statista, admits it's hard to nail down specifics.

"There is no set definition but generally it is used as shorthand for 'Our company is not a soulless machine designed to do absolutely anything — no matter how destructive, reckless or dishonest — in pursuit of a buck,'" Newsweek Global Editor Nancy Cooper writes in an introduction.

The 2023 list includes some big firms in the plastics field. Auto supplier and molder Lear Corp. comes in at No. 36. Packaging firm Berry Global Group Inc. is No. 47. Further down you'll find materials companies such as Celanese, Eastman and PPG. (Cooper notes that the largest number of "responsible companies," 55 of them, were from the materials and chemicals business.)

I know this brief sampling of companies that made the cut have some of you questioning why they didn't rank higher, while others want to know how they could possibly be included at all.

I don't have the answers to either of those questions. But as Cooper writes, the list is an attempt to identify those firms "that are actually serious about trying to be good guys."

Expect some intense questioning about the quality of acrylic aquariums after a high-profile failure of the 50-foot-high AquaDom in Berlin on Dec. 16 that killed the 1,500 fish housed inside it.

The AquaDom, housed inside a Radisson hotel in the German capital, burst before 6 a.m., destroying not only the aquarium and its residents but also heavily damaging the hotel lobby and injuring two people. The attraction opened in 2003 and was renovated in 2020, according to Reuters.

Emergency officials said there was no sign of any attack on the aquarium and local reports pointed to a possible defect in the AquaDom's structure for the cause.