FOOTBALL IS A game of simple physics: One player has a ball, and many other players who do not have the ball want to stop him in his tracks. Sometimes this interaction happens at high speed. Speeds so fast that the parties involved bang into each other with a G force equivalent to a bowling ball being dropped on a head from 8 feet high.

Football is a beautifully violent game, which is the reason Americans simultaneously exalt and fear the sport. It's the reason people cheer when a cornerback makes the tackle or a linebacker pummels his opponent. It's also the reason that one out of every three players in the NFL will experience some form of brain trauma during his career. According to an investigation from Frontline, there have been nearly 200 concussions so far this NFL season, and those are just the concussions that were officially reported.

The NFL has a very real head injury problem. And after years of outright denial, the organization has finally begun to acknowledge its culpability through payouts, researchgrants around traumatic brain injuries, and initiatives like the Head Health Challenge, which gives grants to companies working on advancements in football-related head health. One of those grant recipients was Vicis. Now, the Seattle company has designed a new, flexible helmet called theZero1 it believes can reduce the chances of a player sustaining a concussion.

Football players have always worn some form of protective head gear. Before the plastic boom of the 1950s, helmets were made from leather and looked like aviator caps. It wasn't until the 1970s that helmets included energy-absorbing foam to help mitigate the traumatic effects of impact. But helmet design hasn't evolved much in the past forty years; today's headgear is marked by a stiff outer shell and padded interior that's meant to prevent skull fractures and brain hemorrhages.