Scientists in Pittsburgh can make footballs talk.

Priya Narasimhan, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and her team of 10 engineering students have developed a "smart football" with a GPS unit and accelerometer, both contained in a half-ounce microchip inside the ball.

The chip can measure the speed, spin, trajectory and — even when it's buried under a pile of players — the precise location of the ball.

The NFL is looking into the technology as a way to make officiating and game timing even more accurate.

Narasimhan and her team are not the only ones to have developed such a chip. According to a Reuters report, German manufacturer Cairos Technologies has been in talks with the NFL about putting its chips in footballs to determine, say, when the ball has crossed the goal line.

Cairos has done the same thing with soccer balls, creating a system of thin cables under the playing surface that generate magnetic fields that sensors in the ball pick up. That location information is transmitted to a central computer that uses the data to determine when the ball has crossed the goal line.

There are unique challenges to embedding a similar chip in an oblong football, Narasimhan said.

Some of the challenges aren't immediately obvious to everyone. For instance, how do you charge a chip that loses power quickly? The students in Pittsburgh have developed a system similar to the one used for electric toothbrushes.

Then, there's fine-tuning the GPS to mark the precise spot, rather than within a few feet or yards. And the signal needs to be strong enough to pass through multiple bodies that might be covering the ball.

Simply identifying whether a ball has broken the plane of the goal line isn't enough either.

If the player's knee touched the ground before the ball crossed over, for instance, it isn't a touchdown. Narasimhan raises the possibility of putting chips in kneepads, elbow pads and gloves.

In other words, it's all a work in progress.