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Super Bowl Footballs Get The DNA Touch
theodp writes "All 120 Super Bowl XL footballs will be marked with a drop of synthetic DNA to thwart potential counterfeiters (free reg. required to read) who might be tempted to sell phony game-used Super Bowl footballs, which can be worth thousands of dollars. Exposed to a specific laser frequency, the DNA glows to a bright green. 'The chance of replicating this exact DNA sequence is one in 33 trillion,' said the president of PSA/DNA Authentication Services."
Someone pilfers the documents from PSA/DNA.
33 trillion to 1? Yeah right. All a counterfeiter needs do is make it glow roughly the same green. No need to actually replicate the DNA sequence: no-one will actually check that anyway!
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Eww... doesn't anyone wash their hands anymore?
From the horse's mouth:
NFL Again Uses PSA/DNA to Prevent Super Bowl Footballs Fraud
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Who cares about the probability of replicating the exact sequence? What is the probability that an arbitrary sequence DNA will glow under that light?
Well you figure 2 teams, 30 players each. Yeah it comes out to 120. No wait, you need a football, so 121.
The chance of replicating this exact DNA sequence is one in 33 trillion
Never tell me the odds!
IANA molecular biologist, but isn't there a pretty common process for taking trace DNA, then duplicating it en masse for crime scene investigation?
..don't panic
Who would want to buy a football stained with semen, not to mention pummeled and pounced up on by almost two dozen sweaty heavy guys for two hours non-stop?
Call to get your drapes redone, ask him.
I want to say a regular (non playoff) game will use less than half that number of balls.
If there's anything more important than my ego around, i want it caught and shot now.
1) Purchase legitimate game ball for 'thousands' 2) Extract DNA sequence and replicate using PCR or actually sequence it and then create more 3) ...
4) Profit !
1) Slaughter a pig.
2) Slice the hide into 120 footballs.
3) Serve the leftovers as bacon during the pre-game tailgate.
All the footballs have the same DNA.
The glow is related to the discount the company received by purchasing from Chernobyl pig farmers.
What the hell is stopping a counterfitting group from sequencing the DNA and replicating it?
I mean, they're willing to go the distance to make the balls looks authentic, it can be done.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
"At least the we know where the United States' priorities are. War? Famine? Fuck that, let's support a sport so they can put synthetic DNA on a football. Sorry, but sports are valued entirely too fucking much imo."
Why do people always have to view things in zero-sum terms. Just because research is going into something entertaining like sports doesn't mean it won't translate into other usages. We have spent millions and millions of dollars into figuring out how to make athletes perform better and fix them when they are hurt. This has translated into practical, useful things such as Gatorade and much better procedures for knee and shoulder injuries. The NFL anti-counterfiting measures may turn out to be useful in the future for things such as legal documents.
I think people have a bias against science and research that is not done for "the love of knowledge" itself. The truth is that most of our progress comes from necessity, and many times this necessity is a manufactured necessity rather than a real one. Sometimes it is war research, sometimes sports, sometimes other entertainment such as video games. These things merely provide opportunities for challenges to overcome.
There are probably nuggets of truth in the claim, but first of all DNA does not glow green. Perhaps they used fancy synthetic nucleotide analogs with a fluorescent label? Otherwise, they just spiked cheap marker dye into the mix, separate from the DNA. Furthermore, though a laser of the proper frequency (color) can definately make a fluorescent dye glow green, this is hardly something only a laser can do. Any source of (probably blue-ish) light will do. But of course 'blue flashlight' sounds not nearly as cool as 'laser of a specific frequency'.
The U.S. has a huge trade deficit. Why aren't we exporting this junk?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
"The chance of replicating this exact DNA sequence is one in 33 trillion, so it's virtually impossible."
I'm not saying that the chances of replicating the exact sequence are good, but you figure people involved in sport would know better than to assign odds that long.
Working from known sequences that fluoresce under laser stimulation, I bet they could narrow the odds down, to say, oh, a billion to one. Not that it matters, since what they'll be testing is not the base sequence, but instead whether laser + pig bladder = fluorescence.
So beating their test just means guessing the frequency of the laser.
I'll bet $100 on 100,000 different reproducable frequencies ($10M in bets) and I figure one of them will hit... even if they take a 5% vig, I'm still making out with 3.135 QUADRILLION dollars.
Take that, Dr. Evil.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
1 in 33 trillion is still only a finite improbability, and now that I know the figures, I just need a cup of really hot tea and I'll have myself a goldmine of counterfeit footballs...
Christina Aguilera?
I agree with you that sports are valued too much, but you're pretty silly to assert that the United States had anything much to do with this ridiculous invention. It was a private company looking to take advantage of peoples' rapacious, irrational interest in "authenticity".
If the Franklin Mint can create authenticity, it must not be that valuable.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Yes, I know it is essential that everyone in this country devote every single second of their lives to curing famine and realizing world peace. It's called entertainment, and people appreciate it.
"Is it guaranteed that each multi-thousand $$$ football is even used in the game once? "
No. But the unused balls aren't sold as Superbowl-used balls.
"Does the average game even have 120 plays"
Nope. Roughly 60 plays + special plays (kickoffs, punts, etc). Likely fewer in this game, since both teams have potent running games.
do they really switch them every single play?
For the first half. Then they use only(!) 12 balls for the 2nd half. It's in the article.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Every kick and punt requires a football fresh out of the box (I believe these footballs are manufactured differently, as well, and can only be used for kicks/punts, not normal plays). That's kickoffs, field goals, and extra points. Figure 15-20 balls required just for that, every game, minimum (it can be much more in a defensive battle). I'm not sure if there are any other times fresh balls are required, though.
And the chances of a potential purchaser having the specific laser to verify their purchase? About one in 35 trillion...
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
Well, the AFC championship game between the steelers and broncos had 118 plays, but I sincerely doubt they change the ball between every play. Never really paid enough attention to that.
On topic, an interesting application of tech, not sure that it is real newsworthy (in the slashdot sense)
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
I'm a citizen, and I think this is really stupid. I suspect there are several other people like me. Therefore, you're painting with an overbroad brush.
If you'd said "sports fanatics", I'd have no argument with you. But you went for the "Gosh, aren't Americans dumb?" angle, which never fails to annoy me.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
"All 120 Super Bowl XL footballs will be marked with a drop of synthetic DNA to thwart potential counterfeiters who might be tempted to sell phony game-used Super Bowl footballs, which can be worth thousands of dollars. Exposed to a specific laser frequency, the DNA glows to a bright green."
I wonder what it will cost to get it exposed to that specific laser frequency... a few extra hundred dollars, perhaps? This may defeat the actual point of using the synthetic DNA in the first place: it's hidden cost.
my bet is that the odds stated in the article are for guessing the sequence. The tech is cool, but the retards deciding on using the tech could use some work.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Am I missing something here? Why not just make the pig skins from green pigs in the first place. Try replicating that in your backyard.
OJ Duped a jury using identical odds
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
It just occurred to me: There are only 4 nucleotide bases in DNA, so they give the ballpark figure of how long the strand of DNA is. That was awful helpful of them. They just pulled back on the trigger of their 9mm and shot themselves in the foot. And I bet someone on the inside just sells the "recipe" to the highest bidder.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Selfishly getting educated to make money instead of heading off to a place where you're needed and putting in the labor necessary to get something done? For shame, hypocrite. Your priorities are borne from the comfort of college, and everyone knows how easy it is to look down from that ivory tower. For shame.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
If someone's stupid enough to pay thousands of dollars to buy a football just because it was supposedly used in a Superbowl game, then they deserve it if they get conned.
Similarly, I don't get all these auctions where an article of clothing sells for huge sums of money simply because a celebrity wore it once. Why's it suddenly worth so much more than getting the exact same thing from a store?
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
The do a similar thing with "Official" pace cars in racing. Basically there is a real pace car and then 25 other cars that does one lap before the race and then sell the cars as Official Indy cars or whatever.
Now if only we had a seedless watermelon...
Your intuition is right on. It must be about a 22-23 nucleotide oligomer. 4^22 = 18 trillion or so. Like someone else said, DNA doesn't glow green, so they either used tagged nucleotides or just spiked their DNA-containing ink with a green fluorescent dye. The dye, I suspect, is just so they know where they put the DNA without having to actually discolor the ball.
You'd be amazed if you knew what their profit margin must be. Oligos like that cost about 10 bucks for enough to probably detectably tag all 120 footballs, and you can synthesize any sequence you want. A couple of bucks for that fluoresence dye, some ink, and I bet it costs them about a quarter a ball altogether. You could even do this sort of thing yourself for not much more. Most DNA synthesis companies will happily do business with private citizens. The only substantial cost would be verifiying an object that someone brings in, but even that just requires a half-decent molecular biology tech and some not-too-expensive equipment. You don't need to actually sequence the thing to verify that it matches a reference sample - you can just cheaply and quickly test binding affinity. I'll bet they charge for verification, anyway. So this whole scheme is probably the next-best thing to printing money.
(IAAMB - molecular biologist)
So you're saying I have a chance.
Sheesh.... what's the reasoning behind that? Because some sissy will complain that the ball was scuffed, and that's why they missed, or something?
Don't change ball = every person has to deal with the same ball = more fair, imho. Plus, you don't end up needing 120 balls for a football game...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
try and patent it... the Devil has prior art... he get's people to sign the contract with their own blood
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Let me guess, you're one of those guys trying to get linux running on a cardboard box and a box of Kleenex, aren't you?
-|BlackErtai|-
You know, I think I saw a blue dress that has been marked with authentic presidential DNA for sale on eBay recently.
It glows white when exposed to a forensics flashlight.
Yeah, who needs entertainment? I'm going to get off of this stupid, pointless forum and do some real, important work. Thank you for pointing out the folly of my foolish ways, from now on I resolve to do nothing but work.
Like someone else said, DNA doesn't glow green, so they either used tagged nucleotides or just spiked their DNA-containing ink with a green fluorescent dye. The dye, I suspect, is just so they know where they put the DNA without having to actually discolor the ball.
Or they simply went and bought a marking kit from somewhere like Smart Water http://www.smartwater.com/
I'm not sure if there are any other times fresh balls are required, though.
I like to keep my balls fresh all the time, thank you very much.
I agree with you that sports are valued too much, but you're pretty silly to assert that the United States had anything much to do with this ridiculous invention.
/ 20060131/SPORTS0106/601310310/1126/SPORTS0101
Dosn't look quite that way if you read this article http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=
"Does the average game even have 120 plays"
Nope. Roughly 60 plays + special plays (kickoffs, punts, etc). Likely fewer in this game, since both teams have potent running games.
Wrong. There are 60 minutes in a game. Even if the clock ran continuously through the game, they only get 40 seconds max between plays, plus the time the actual play takes, so maybe one play per 45 seconds. This means a minimum of 80 plays. In reality, teams don't take the full 40 seconds between plays all the time, plus the clock stops after an incomplete pass, whenever the ball carrier goes out of bounds, at the end of quarters/halves, after scores, and after every timeout - and it doesn't start again until the next snap.
Consider the extreme situation, the two-minute drill at the end of the game. Teams often run 6 or 7 plays during a single (game-clock) minute.
A much closer estimate would probably be a play every 30 game-clock seconds, or 120 plays per game.
do they really switch them every single play?
For the first half. Then they use only(!) 12 balls for the 2nd half. It's in the article.
Also note that this isn't standard practice for all NFL games, just something for the Super Bowl. Although even in regular season games, they still keep some ridiculous number of balls on hand. It's usually left up to the offensive team how often they switch the ball, so they could technically do it every play for the whole season.
It's not like the cost for this many balls, even with embedded DNA, is the least bit significant for the NFL, considering what they are making off this one game.
Hell, even in grade school football I remember each team running in a clean, dry ball at the beginning of each possession, and more often in bad weather.
I'll bet that the odds are less than 33 trillion to one that you could bribe someone who works for the synthetic DNA company to pilfer a sample for you.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Let me guess, you're one of those guys who hears "Give me a second" and actually counts to one..
MABASPLOOM!
Lets do the math...
120 footballs + 10 cheerleaders = Sticky Balls.
The NFL can party like no other.
So one could steal the combination and replicate it in a snap. And the combintion itslef could be a simple file stored in an unsecure system.
It'd be better to educate people about the real value of a used dirty football ball!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
"Don't forget the million's of Steeler's and Seahawks jersey's, hat's, scarve's, seat cushion's, beer mug's, key chain's, mirror's, pool table light's, glove's, ballcap's, parka's, etc, etc, etc, etc that are being sold this week, all licensed NFL item's..."
I fixed that for you.
I think our friend needs to take a course in probability. Or maybe biology, or perhaps common sense.
If the DNA is replicated enough times to be placed on 120 different footballs, then the chance of replicating it has been proven by example, so it's basically 100%.
The chance of replicating it without knowledge of it's base pairs is much lower, but if you can get a sample of the DNA (come in contact with a valid game ball), you can easily replicate it 100% without even knowing the sequence. After all, your replicate DNA in your own body tissues without knowledge of the sequence, and similar techniques have been used in the lab for a few decades now.
actually, just the opposite.
from the article:
NFL kickers and punters always have new footballs to deal with. In 1999, in order to encourage returns by making it more difficult for a kicker to reach the end zone, the league began using "K-Balls" -- kicking footballs -- that went largely untreated. From the start, they were unpopular with those required to use them, kickers and punters who previously had the ability to knead, scuff, even microwave footballs before using them in games.
Now the K-Balls are handed to them right before the play, leading to those almost comical moments when kickers animatedly squash, punch and push on them just before they are set on a tee.
"The leather isn't cracked," Brown said of a K-Ball. "It's very sharp, the edges are sharp. Sometimes it doesn't feel as if it's aired-up enough. You get a quarterback ball, and that ball's hitting hands, it's popping, it's cracking. The ball expands during the game, so the leather becomes more pliable to your hands. There's a big difference."
-- derby
PSA/DNA is just a partner of Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada-based DNA Technologies. They've done the Super Bowl footballs for years, NHL All-Star Game pucks, even the 2000 Olympics.
Why not just sequence the DNA of the leather? Pigs have DNA too.
There's probably at least one 'freak' amongst the players with three. To say nothing about the contingent 'rap-star gangsta' players (the ones whose hair doesn't even fit inside the helmet) who've had one of theirs blown off in a driveby.
"... Seahawk's ..."
I fixed that for you.
here is the real purpose:
/ 04/1422255&threshold=0
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02
Guess they must have forgot the bacon and just went for the pigskin.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
"IE-You can go buy some parkas, but one of the parka's collars may be damaged." Actually, that'd be, "You can go buy some parkas, but one of the parkas' collars may be damaged."
Yeah, there are ways to get around this security. You could get a sample of the DNA, resynthesize it, then manufacture a duplicate ball, and create a fake.
But the cost of counterfiet is greater than the $2000 the ball is going to go for. Which makes it a succesful deterent.
How exactly does that make it look less ridiculous?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
What ARE you talking about?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Pretty cool, eh?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
While you may have taken AP biology, you clearly didn't pay too much attention - at least not to the molecular biology component.
1. Mix it in with polychromase
I'll give you credit that you looked up what the initials PCR mean.
If you don't mind me asking, where can I pick up some polychromase?
2. DNA doesn't inherently glow green. You'll need to add a component such as CyberGreen to the reaction.
3. Random primers won't give you an exact replica - you'll need to sequence first.
4. Realistically, you'll never obtain enough DNA from PCR to get "a big container of paste". If you want a small pellet of DNA, you'd be much better off cloning the DNA into a vector, growing it up in come competent cells, extracting the DNA, and then digesting out the portion you want.
It's quite sad that such an ignorant and incorrect post got modded up.
Sounds like a nice analysis in theory, but in practice the ones making the really big bucks (the "$3M to toss a ball around" quarterback type) don't EVER stop earning (commercials, endorsements, speeches/conventions, broadcasting, etc). The ones who didn't make the big bucks can't afford to retire after 4 years of work (the average NFL career) any more than you or I.
A ID=/20060129/SPORTS/601290350/1002
I know a couple guys from college who played pro football - I would be surprised if they ever made more than $300k a year for all of the 3-4 years they played before getting injured and/or cut. Luckily they were smart guys who actually got something out of their free college education so went onto I-banking, various entrempeneurial activities, managing family business, etc. But the majority of ex-players who weren't as educated or connected can have a really hard time...
Relevent article on this from last week:
http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?
Good sir.
If you are male, a quick self examination will indeed confirm that the average male has 2 balls.
Hence 2 teams with 30 players each with 2 balls each is 120. Plus 1 is 121.
((2 * 30) * 2) + 1 = 121
I assumed most people knew that men have two balls. So let me ask you? Where did you get your balls? Because if you have just one you may want to go back to the dealer and get that checked out. Your body may be a lemon, your state may have consumer protection laws that can help you out.
There's easily two jokes outta this one.
Isn't it funny that a man will purchase balls to place on his mantle when his wife already keeps the pair he use to have there?
(rimshot followed by silence)
Thank you...
And finally...
Who goes shopping for footballs with lasers? I mean you don't see me going to walmart and be all like, "Hey, it says genuine Hanes brand socks. I gotta hit that with a laser before it's going in my basket..."
Okay, you've been a great crowd...