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It's September, and the leaves on the tips of the maple trees' branches are slowly turning orange. School is back in session, and we've already had two Virginia Tech home football games.

Before last weekend's home game, there was a small plane flying over Blacksburg pulling a banner behind it. We wondered what the banner's text, "ThisIsTheFuture.com" was all about until a couple of fighter jets flew over and sent us diving for cover, all other issues quickly forgotten.

A couple of days later, walking near the football stadium on my way home from work, I found a battered cardboard rectangle on the ground. It was orange with white text reading "ThisIsTheFuture.com." My curiosity was re-piqued, so when I got home I checked it out.

It's an official Virginia Tech Web site, using the familiar Web templates with the shiny red header block on each page. It has its own dot-com domain name, but it does belong to Tech. On my screen, it had a big blank square under the template Tech header. That's because of my trusty Firefox add-on called "Flashblock," which I use to keep Flash files from automatically playing. I clicked the "play" button that Flashblock provides and the window filled with orange words and gray names, all lazily floating around like goldfish in a big tank. A block in the middle of the page invites the viewer to "Click on the orange words to find out what we're doing to make tomorrow better than today."

The middle block also displays images related to the words, such as "Computers," "Poultry," "Power" and "Helmets." When you mouse over the floating words, a clicking noise like a manual typewriter emanates from the computer speakers. There is a round badge that reads, "make an impact." If you click and drag the badge, you can use it to knock the floating text around the screen. I spent several happy minutes chasing words around.

Once I corralled all the floating words onto one side of the window, I clicked on a couple of names and was treated to people's stories about their experiences with Tech and interesting and useful things they have done in Virginia.

Next, I sampled the floating orange text that says "Helmets." The central square presented a block of text explaining that the Hokies football team has been using special helmets involved in research on brain injury monitoring. A link led to an article on the main Tech Web site that described the project. Stefan Duma, a mechanical engineering professor, and his research team have altered helmets for the Hokies to include sensors that record impacts the players endure during football games.

The page contained a link to a video that shows the sensors inside the helmets and how the impacts can be monitored in real time from computers on the sidelines. If a player takes a blow that is enough to cause a concussion, he can be taken out of the game and treated. Concussions can damage your brain, but without the sensors coaches wouldn't have any way of knowing how hard any given hit was.

The article explained that most hits that linemen take register between 10 and 40 Gs, but the highest are more than 100 Gs. I called my dad, a retired aerospace engineer, to get more information on G forces. The "G" measurement stands for "gravity." Sitting still on the Earth, you are experiencing 1 G. It's a measure of acceleration. Taking off in the space shuttle, you would experience about 3 or 4 Gs. If you were driving at the Texas Motor Speedway, on the backstretches you would be traveling at 5 Gs. You would feel as if you weighed five times as much as you normally do -- to turn your head you would have to fight 60 to 70 pounds of force. Fighter pilots can lose consciousness between 6 and 9 Gs in flight. According to race car driver Kenny Brack's Web site, in 2003 he experienced a crash that took him from 220 mph to zero in a matter of seconds. His car recorded a 214 G impact, and he was seriously injured. A hundred Gs is a terrific amount of force for a football player to experience at all, much less on a regular basis.

I headed back to ThisIsTheFuture.com and checked out the promo materials. It's a campaign to publicize research done by Tech, and the site encourages people to submit stories about "what you're doing to make Virginia a better place to live or how research at Virginia Tech has impacted you." If you would like to join the floating names, there's a fill-in form to tell your story in 300 words or fewer.

I wonder what the next unusual form the campaign to publicize the site will take. Fortune cookies? Skywriting? Now you'll have to excuse me, I'm going to chase down that floating orange word that says "Computers."

Pris Sears grew up in Florida, lives in Blacksburg and works among Virginia Tech's computers.