Airplane bathrooms are not most people’s idea of a good time. They’re barely big enough to turn around in. Their doors stick, like they’re trying to trap you in place. That’s to say nothing of the smell. But to the CDC, those same bathrooms might be a data gold mine.

This month, the agency has been speaking with Concentric, the public-health and biosecurity arm of the biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks, about screening airplane wastewater for COVID-19 at airports around the country. Although plane-wastewater testing had been in the works already (a pilot program at John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York City, concluded last summer), concerns about a new variant arising in China after the end of its “zero COVID” policies acted as a “catalyst” for the project, Matt McKnight, Ginkgo’s general manager for biosecurity, told me. According to Ginkgo, even airport administrators are getting excited. “There have been a couple of airports who have actually reached out to the CDC to ask to be part of the program,” Laura Bronner, Ginkgo’s vice president of commercial strategies, told me.

Airplane-wastewater testing is poised to revolutionize how we track the coronavirus’s continued mutations around the world, along with other common viruses such as flu and RSV—and public-health threats that scientists don’t even know about yet. Unlike sewer-wide surveillance, which shows us how diseases are spreading among large communities, airplane surveillance is precisely targeted to catch new variants entering the country from abroad. And unlike with PCR testing, passengers don’t have to individually opt in. (The results remain anonymous either way.) McKnight compares the technique to radar: Instead of responding to an attack after it’s unfolded, America can get advance warning about new threats before they cause problems. As we enter an era in which most people don’t center their lives on avoiding COVID-19, our best contribution to public health might be using a toilet at 30,000 feet.

Fundamentally, wastewater testing on airplanes is a smaller-scale version of the surveillance that has been taking place at municipal water networks since early 2020: Researchers perform genetic testing on sewage samples to determine how much coronavirus is present, and which variants are included. But adapting the methodology to planes will require researchers to get creative. For one thing, airplane wastewater has a higher solid-to-liquid ratio. Municipal sewage draws from bathing, cooking, washing clothes, and other activities, whereas airplane sewage is “mainly coming from the toilet,” says Kata Farkas, a microbiologist at Bangor University. For a recent study tracking COVID-19 at U.K. airports, Farkas and her colleagues had to adjust their analytical methods, tweaking the chemicals and lab techniques used to isolate the coronavirus from plane sewage.

Researchers also need to select flights carefully to make sure the data they gather are worth the effort of collecting them. To put it bluntly, not everyone poops on the plane—and if the total number of sampled passengers is very small, the analysis isn’t likely to return much useful data. “The number of conversations we’ve had about how to inconspicuously know how many people on a flight have gone into a lavatory is hysterical,” says Casandra Philipson, who leads the Concentric bioinformatics program. (Concentric later clarified that they do not have plans to actually monitor passengers’ bathroom use.) Researchers ended up settling on an easier metric: Longer flights tend to have more bathroom use and should therefore be the focus of wastewater testing. (Philipson and her colleagues also work with the CDC to test flights from countries where the government is particularly interested in identifying new variants.)

[Read: Are our immune systems stuck in 2020?]

Beyond those technical challenges, scientists face the daunting task of collaborating with airports and airlines—large companies that aren’t used to participating in public-health surveillance. “It is a tricky environment to work in,” says Jordan Schmidt, the director of product applications at LuminUltra, a Canadian biotech company that tests wastewater at Toronto Pearson Airport. Strict security and complex bureaucracies in air travel can make collecting samples from individual planes difficult, he told me. Instead, LuminUltra samples from airport terminals and from trucks that pull sewage out of multiple planes, so the company doesn’t need to get buy-in from airlines.

Airplane surveillance seeks to track new variants, not individual passengers: Researchers are not contact-tracing exactly which person brought a particular virus strain into the country. For that reason, companies such as Concentric aren’t planning to alert passengers that COVID-19 was found on their flight, much as some of us might appreciate that warning. Testing airplane sewage can identify variants from around the world, but it won’t necessarily tell us about new surges in the city where those planes land.

Airplane-wastewater testing offers several advantages for epidemiologists. In general, testing sewage is “dramatically cheaper” and “dramatically less invasive” than nose-swab testing each individual person in a town or on a plane, says Rob Knight, a medical engineering professor at UC San Diego who leads the university’s wastewater-surveillance program. Earlier this month, a landmark report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (which Knight co-authored) highlighted international airports as ideal places to seek out new coronavirus variants and other pathogens. “You’re going to capture people who are traveling from other parts of the world where they might be bringing new variants,” Knight told me. And catching those new variants early is key to updating our vaccines and treatments to ensure that they continue to work well against COVID-19. Collecting more data from people traveling within the country could be useful too, Knight said, since variants can evolve at home as easily as abroad. (XBB.1.5, the latest variant dominating COVID-19 spread in the U.S., is thought to have originated in the American Northeast.) To this end, he told me, the CDC should consider monitoring large train stations or seaports too.

[Read: The COVID data that are actually useful now]

When wastewater testing first took off during the pandemic, the focus was mostly on municipal facilities, because they could provide data for an entire city or county at once. But scientists have since realized that a more specific view of our waste can be helpful, especially in settings that are crucial for informing public-health actions. For example, at NYC Health + Hospitals, the city’s public health-care system, wastewater data help administrators “see 10 to 14 days in advance if there are any upticks” in coronavirus, flu, or mpox, Leopolda Silvera, Health + Hospitals’ global-health deputy, told me. Administrators use the data in decisions about safety measures and where to send resources, Silvera said: If one hospital’s sewage indicates an upcoming spike in COVID-19 cases, additional staff can be added to its emergency department.

Schools are another obvious target for small-scale wastewater testing. In San Diego, Rebecca Fielding-Miller directed a two-year surveillance program for elementary schools. It specifically focused on underserved communities, including refugees and low-income workers who were hesitant to seek out PCR testing. Regular wastewater testing picked up asymptomatic cases with high accuracy, providing school staff and parents with “up to the minute” information about COVID-19 spread in their buildings, Fielding-Miller told me. This school year, however, funding for the program ran out.

Even neighborhood-level surveillance, while not as granular as sampling at a plane, hospital, or school, can provide more useful data than city-wide testing. In Boston, “we really wanted hyperlocal surveillance” to inform placements of the city’s vaccine clinics, testing sites, and other public-health services, says Kathryn Hall, the deputy commissioner at the city’s public-health agency. She and her colleagues identified 11 manhole covers that provide “good coverage” of specific neighborhoods and could be tested without too much disruption to traffic. When a testing site lights up with high COVID-19 numbers, Hall’s colleagues reach out to community organizations such as health centers and senior-living facilities. “We make sure they have access to boosters, they have access to PPE, they understand what’s going on,” Hall told me. In the nearby city of Revere, a similar program run by the company CIC Health showed an uptick in RSV in neighborhood wastewater before the virus started making headlines. CIC shared the news with day-care centers and helped them respond to the surge with educational information and PPE.

[Read: Whatever happened to toilet plumes?]

According to wastewater experts, hyperlocal programs can’t usher in a future of disease omnipotence all by themselves. Colleen Naughton, an environmental-engineering professor at UC Merced who runs the COVIDPoops19 dashboard, told me she would like to see communities with no wastewater surveillance get resources to set it up before more funding goes into testing individual buildings or manhole covers. The recent National Academies report presents a future of wastewater surveillance that includes both broad monitoring across the country and testing targeted to places where new health threats might emerge or where certain communities need local information to stay safe.

This future will require sustained federal funding beyond the current COVID-19 emergency, which is set to expire if the Biden administration does not renew it in April. The United States needs “better and more technology, with a funding model that supports its development,” in order for wastewater’s true potential to be realized, Knight said. Airplane toilets may very well be the best first step toward that comprehensive sewage-surveillance future.

Last week, the Dallas Cowboys’ playoff run ended the same way their last 11 have—without a trip to the conference championship. For one fan, squatting maybe four feet from the TV, this was apparently more than he could take. He leapt to his feet and—in front of a room full of people—punched a massive crater in the screen. The impact sounded like the popping of a very large balloon. The screen instantly went dark. He then lifted the TV off the console table, smashed it over his knee WWE-style, and unleashed a primal scream.

This display, captured on video and turned into a pair of viral TikToks last week, might seem completely psychotic. And make no mistake—it is! But it’s also fully in keeping with a great sporting tradition. When things don’t go their way, most fans are content to sulk. Some might curse and shout a little. But for certain fans—more, perhaps, than you would think—that is not enough. For them, the thing to do is to destroy their TV. And then post about it online. Obviously.

In a highly unscientific survey of the many, many fan-smashing-TV videos online, I encountered one Golden State Warriors fan and a decent number of soccer fans, including a Mexican-national-team supporter who stabbed his TV to death with a large knife and an Olympique de Marseille fan who totals his TV by one of a variety of methods—scissors kick, head-butt, hatchet, another TV—every time his side loses. But NFL fans are in a league of their own, accounting for more than two-thirds of the 30-plus demolitions I found. There’s the New Orleans Saints fan who chucked his TV off a balcony (“Stop, Kyle!” a woman cries to no avail). There’s the fan of an unknown team—strangely, the game is blurred out—who obliterates his TV in a single, decisive blow (“Man,” he mutters, “that shit piss me off, man”).

[Read: Sports streaming makes losers of us all]

Best of all, perhaps, there’s the Seattle Seahawks fan who, after his team’s infamous goal-line interception in Super Bowl XLIX, says, in a voice brimming with fury, “You do not throw a fucking pass at the goal line when you have Marshawn Lynch,” then, with a running start, launches his entire body through the flatscreen, much as Marshawn Lynch, the team’s star running back, might have launched himself through the defensive line on the run that never was. TV-smashing incidents have grown so ubiquitous that they have become a meme. Since at least late 2021, disconsolate fans have been sharing the same story, with their own team’s name subbed in. Last night, after the Cincinnati Bengals lost a tight game to the Kansas City Chiefs in the conference championship game, several fans tweeted a version of this: "Just smashed my 4K TV in front of over 30 guests at my cocktail party because of the Bengals performance today. My wife just took our crying kids and said they’re all spending the night in a motel. This team has ruined my life and my party. I can’t do this any longer. Goodbye."  

If football fans are far and away the most TV-destructive sports fans, then Cowboy fans are far and away the most TV-destructive football fans. In a way, this makes sense: No team has combined a sense of entitlement to victory with a consistent failure to achieve it in quite the way Dallas has over the past 25 years. Even so, the degree of violence is remarkable. Highlights include the man who shot his TV with a handgun—not the way Elvis used to; more like a hitman finishing the job—and the man who ran over his TV with a pickup truck. These videos are of course funny on first viewing, but they’re also depressing when you think about them a little too hard. It’s impossible to know whether what you’re watching is the manifestation of an unaddressed mental-health problem or a prelude to domestic abuse or something entirely benign.

Whatever the truth behind any individual video, one factor fueling the phenomenon is that destroying your TV has never been easier. “This is something people do pretty frequently,” Spencer Hall, a longtime football analyst and ESPN contributor who writes the Channel 6 newsletter, told me. “It’s a golden era for TV-smashers.” It comes down to a simple cost-benefit analysis. On the cost side, destroying a TV is far easier and less risky than it used to be. “Have you ever tried to smash an old television? It's impossible,” said Hall, who has not done so “recreationally.” The glass can be more than half an inch thick, and even if you do manage to break it, the stuff on the interior—high-voltage capacitors, small amounts of radiation, several pounds of lead—is not to be messed with. And in terms of actual monetary cost, flatscreens are way cheaper than they used to be—97 percent cheaper than they were in the year 2000. “They’ve almost become disposable,” says James Willcox, a senior electronics editor at Consumer Reports who has covered TVs for more than 20 years. “If something happens, you’re not going to fix it.”

[Read: The hidden cost of cheap TVs]

On the benefit side, the potential payoff of wrecking your TV has never been greater. TV-smashing videos regularly rack up tens of thousands of views, in some cases many hundreds of thousands. Internet virality is a total black box, but as gambits go, blowing your TV to bits is a relatively good bet. All of which makes it difficult, in the case of any individual video, to ascertain whether the fury is staged or genuine. Sometimes, though, there are hints. The recent viral video of the Cowboys fan punching out his TV was captured from two angles, which, while not dispositive, does seem like cause for skepticism.

And yet some of the videos seem like they must be real—or else the TV-smasher is doing one hell of an acting job. Take this one, of a Minnesota Vikings fan spiraling out of control after a late interception seals a 2013 playoff loss to the Green Bay Packers. “Whyyyyy!?” he howls. “Whyyyy!? No! It’s over!”

“It’s not that big a deal,” says the woman watching with him, who appears to be his partner. “Frickin’ hell, Garrett!”

But alas, to Garrett, who has already reached behind him, grabbed a massive speaker, and lifted it like a club above the glass coffee table, it is, in fact, a big deal. The table shatters on impact. “Oh my gosh, Garrett, are you serious!?” the woman shouts. “That was my grandma’s table!”

The video jumps ahead in time. Garrett is now picking up shards of glass. He is calm, if not exactly contrite. “Garrett, you seriously can’t do this every single time something bad happens,” the woman says.

“Well,” he answers, without missing a beat, “it’s the playoffs.”

Bobby Hull, hockey Hall of Famer and Stanley Cup champion, died Monday at 84, the Chicago Blackhawks announced.

Legal challenges now stand in the way of President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel thousands of dollars in education loans for millions of Americans. As a professor focused on debt and inequality, I’m rooting for the plan to succeed. But I’m also concerned that it does nothing to address the problems in higher education that are scaring off a new generation of potential students.

Over the past three and a half years, I have been talking with more than 30 low-income students and their families from across the country about their attitudes toward student debt and their paths after high school. Contrary to my expectations, many told me they were enrolling in inexpensive two-year colleges or eschewing higher education entirely.

[Read: What the student-loan debate overlooks]

These interviews suggest that some families, forced to borrow money just to cover the basic cost of living, are not willing to borrow yet more money for educational reasons, even if it would give them access to skilled jobs and better salaries in the future. Their fear is rational under current circumstances.

As I traveled to different states, I met low-income high-school graduates like Olivia Hall, who grew up watching her mother struggle to pay off her loans and vowed not to fall into the same trap. Hall considered charging tuition to a credit card, rather than borrowing, but ultimately skipped college. She works at a sandwich shop now. Charlie Andry asked friends and family to donate to her GoFundMe campaign to save up money for the University of Illinois at Chicago, after turning down an offer from the more expensive Northwestern University to retain a few thousand dollars. Many others, such as Mia Mujaahid, are lured away from education by $17-an-hour jobs at warehouses and big-box stores.

The American higher-education system appears broken for all but the most well-off. Selective colleges are receiving more applications than ever before, fueling the impression that Americans of all sorts are aiming for the elite college experience. But the rise of applications is partly the result of the same students sending applications to more schools, as a recent report shows.

Already-stretched families hesitate to extend themselves more. Students who borrow for higher education but fail to complete their degrees struggle the most to pay back the money. This group includes disproportionately high numbers of people of color and low-income individuals. Among those enrolled full-time, 40 percent of Black students and 54 percent of Latino students do not attain bachelor’s degrees within six years, compared with about two-thirds of white students. Almost half of students from families with incomes below $35,000 fail to graduate within the same period, compared with less than a third from families with incomes above $75,000. Students who drop out default on student loans at a rate three times higher than those who graduate. Families who fail to make payments on college debt risk their wages being garnished, their income-tax refunds being withheld, and their credit scores being lowered, which can make it difficult to obtain leases and can lead to higher interest rates on other loans.

In recent decades, the U.S. has made an attempt to narrow persistent race- and income-based inequalities in educational attainment by helping students of different backgrounds access loans. Now the Biden administration is trying to cancel some of that debt. But canceling existing student debt up to a specific amount does nothing to help new students apply to and attend universities that will give them the greatest odds of success.

[Josh Mitchell: A crimson tide of debt]

Before 1965, most federal aid was given directly to colleges and not to students. Historically, states issued more assistance to postsecondary institutions and students than the federal government did. In 1990, states’ per-student funding was almost 140 percent more than that of the federal government, according to research by the Pew Charitable Trusts. But in recent years, the amount of funding supplied by states has dropped. States should increase direct funding levels.

The pandemic has exposed and perpetuated inequalities in higher education. Americans can no longer pretend that trying to equalize college access with postcollege approaches will be sufficient. Families desperately need the hope and opportunity that education provides. That starts with recognizing their unwillingness to take on debt.