There are plenty of reasons Shannon Boxx shouldn’t have been able to win her spot on the U.S. women’s national soccer team this year. Even for the midfielder with 190 appearances to date, 27 goals, three Olympic gold medals and a runner-up finish at the 2011 World Cup, the odds seemed stacked against her at 37 years old and following both the birth of her first child and knee surgery.

Boxx, though, knows how to fight against the odds; she’s been doing that for more than a decade. And so when head coach Jill Ellis announced the roster for the Women’s World Cup on April 14, Boxx’s name was there for fourth straight time.

“She’s been remarkable,” Ellis said when selecting Boxx for the 23-player squad, “from where we were in last October when she came for qualifying to now. Physically she’s been tremendous and she’s turned it around.”

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Three months out from the London 2012 Olympic Games, all available data pointed to one thing: the U.S. women’s track cycling pursuit team had no chance, at least not if it stuck by the book. Dotsie Bausch, Sarah Hammer, Jennie Reed, and Lauren Tamayo didn’t have the money or the manpower available to do things the traditional way.

So they tore up the training manual and turned instead to another set of data: their own. Perhaps, if they knew absolutely everything they could know about their own bodies—numbers gleaned from fitness trackers, medical devices and DNA testing—they could find enough of an edge to bring home a medal. Personal Gold, a documentary premiering at the Seattle International Film Festival on May 16, tells the story of that experiment, and the hypothesis-affirming silver medals they won. It also offers a hint of where science might be taking sports, and what may be in store for Rio 2016 and beyond.

Before London, the U.S. women hadn’t won a track medal in 20 years. In 2000, USA Cycling moved to dissolve its amateur programs and reassign resources in search of professional success. Lance Armstrong, George Hincapie, and Floyd Landis were American cycling, not a handful of amateurs competing in velodromes. Three years before London, the International Olympic Committee also cut the individual pursuit from the track competition. Hammer, then a two-time world champion in that event, was stranded.

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The black cellphone-sized device buzzed intently three times. 80 mg/dL, the screen urgently warned in bright red letters on a black background, LOW. Time to take a sip of Gatorade.

The insistent messenger in question is the Dexcom G4 Platinum handset, a simple looking gadget that has made a big difference in the lives of many diabetics. One of a handful of continuous glucose monitors on the market, the G4 allows people suffering from type 1 mellitus—as many as three million Americans, according to JDRF, an organization that campaigns for research funding to cure type 1—to keep constant track of their blood sugar levels.

“A lot of times with the [glucose] meter I was more reactive,” says Haley Ganser, 31, who was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was 15, and has been using a CGM since 2012. “I would feel that my blood sugars were dropping and so I would test myself. Now because I have the Dexcom I can actually see ‘OK, I’m at a fine level now, but it looks like I’m starting to drop, so I should probably eat a little snack now, before I start to feel the effects of the low blood sugar.’ So I can catch things faster.”

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How do you solve a problem like concussions in sports? Fears over the short- and long-term health effects of head impacts in collision sports have already led to rule changes, lawsuits, and decreased youth participation in football and hockey. Last month, a scientific study turned the spotlight onto baseball, concluding that major league players returning to action after having suffered a concussion performed statistically worse at the plate. But can science or technology also find a way to fix this?

According to that baseball research, which was published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, several batting metrics dropped significantly following a concussion-enforced break, including batting average (.249 to .227), on-base percentage (.315 to .287), and slugging percentage (.393 to .347). Those results made national news and were picked up by The New York Times, Reuters and Fox News. But reading between the numbers raises perhaps the biggest issue with concussions: We don’t know enough.

“I think it was a well-intentioned study,” says Uzma Samadani, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at NYU’s Langone Medical Center, and co-director of NYU’s Steven and Alexandra Cohen Veterans Center, “[but] I’m not convinced that the conclusions are sound. I think they’re overstated.”

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A couple of days before Christmas, Sam Cossman balanced precariously on a rock face 800 feet above one of the world’s seven permanent lava lakes, in the Marum crater on Ambrym island, Vanuatu, in the South Pacific. Dark was falling, but the orange light from the 2,000-degree molten rock below lit up the crater around him like perpetual sunset. The ActSafe powered rope ascender that was supposed to lift him and his 70 pounds of gear back up to basecamp was leaking fuel. All he could do was hug tightly to the rock wall and wait for tools and a new tank of gas to be brought down to him. Then it began to rain.

The sulfur dioxide in the air turned each falling drop into burning acid, and within moments the trickle of water down the rock face was replaced by a torrent. The ground above was mostly bare rock, so rainstorms quickly triggered flash flooding. As the water ran down the side of the crater it brought with it a hailstorm of loose rocks, before plunging into the lava below. When it hit the molten rock, thick, choking plumes of acidic steam rose back upwards.

Two days earlier, on his first descent of this expedition, Cossman had been hit hard by a falling rock. He’d lost his grip on the rope and been momentarily dazed, but luckily it had left no more than a painful bruise near his right collarbone. This time he might not be quite so fortunate. What the f— am I doing here? he thought.

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Signing Day spurs talk of impact players, sleepers and star ratings. Here’s what it all means, with an eye toward the next level

Who gets picked — How high school ratings relate to NFL draft results (2005 through ’09)

*Doesn’t include transfers

(full article published in Sports Illustrated, February 9, 2015)

Everything started with a simple yellow line. On September 27, 1998, Sportvision debuted its yellow first down marker on the ESPN broadcast of the Week 4 game between the Ravens and Bengals. For the first time fans watching at home could see the exact moment the ball crossed the plane.

Sixteen years later, Sportvision can now weave almost anything into a football broadcast, from down and distance arrows to virtual video screens; it can even reveal the yard lines completely obscured by snow during winter games.

The chroma key and camera modeling technologies on which the yellow first down line was built, though, still lie deep at the heart of almost everything the company has brought to football since 1998. “That whole concept just blew everybody away,” says Mike Jakob, president of Sportvision. “It still remains one of the foundational [improvements] that we think enhance the viewing experience.”

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