UBER-​​SOLDIERS A LONG WAY OFF

Thanks to their sleek, form-​​fitting bat­tle suits, ordi­nary sol­diers may some­day turn into super­men.
Bullets won’t stop them; nei­ther will chem­i­cal attacks. Their nanotech-​​made mus­cles might let them jump higher and kick more butt than their oppo­nents. And if they do some­how get hurt, the suit could imme­di­ately start to heal them and report their injuries back to head­quar­ters.
At least, that’s what a col­lec­tion of indus­trial, aca­d­e­mic and mil­i­tary big­wigs promised, as they gath­ered here this week for the offi­cial launch of MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
The real­ity is that a new kind of water­proof­ing for their vests and pon­chos is the only tech­no­log­i­cal advance infantry­men are likely to see in the next few years from “ISN.“
The 125-​​person-​​plus Institute, started last year with a $50 mil­lion grant from the Army, got its offi­cial kick­off Thursday at MIT’s Technology Square. Under a pair of large white tents, and in the Institute’s new offices, a bat­tal­ion of gen­er­als and vice pres­i­dents her­alded the dawn of the ber-​​soldier with high-​​end videos, slick brochures and a buf­fet lunch.
Grunts paraded around in mock-​​ups of their new uni­forms. And Army Specialist Jason Ashline, shot in the chest dur­ing the Afghan con­flict, briefly men­tioned how body armor saved his life.
But it was the ner­vous, smil­ing MIT grad­u­ate stu­dents and pro­fes­sors in the ISN labs upstairs who gave the most real­is­tic assess­ments of what to expect from the Institute.
Yes, they’ve devel­oped mol­e­c­u­lar struc­tures that can swing open and shut like a hinge when hit with an elec­tric field. And sure, some­day, if they can fig­ure out how to coor­di­nate mil­lions and mil­lions of these hinges, they could maybe turn them into exo-​​muscles on a soldier’s bat­tle suit that could “pro­vide addi­tional mus­cle strength for lift­ing or jump­ing.“
But right now, they can’t even get the hinges to line up, “even on a micron (1,000th of a mil­lime­ter) scale,” said grad­u­ate stu­dent Nathan Vandesteeg. It’s a long way from a micron to a mus­cle.
“We’re always con­fronted with the fact that the peo­ple we’re work­ing for are com­ing up with these crazy ideas,” he con­tin­ued. “It gets you excited. But then there’s the whole real­iza­tion of whether this will hap­pen when I’m here — or ever.“
Check out my Wired News arti­cle for more from the ISN.
MEDIA TECHNO-​​DROOL ALERT: Those crit­i­cal thinkers at Reuters and USA Today have swal­lowed MIT’s super-​​soldier hype, no ques­tions asked.

Reuters: “If you ask the U.S. Army’s chief sci­en­tist what the future American sol­dier may look like, he points to the sci­ence fic­tion body armor depicted in the ‘Predator’ movie star­ring Arnold Schwarzenegger.“
USA Today: “It was once the stuff of sci­ence fic­tion movies: sol­diers equipped with high-​​tech gear that made them stronger, swifter and smarter invul­ner­a­ble to bul­lets and able to sur­vive the harsh­est con­di­tions. On Thursday, the U.S. Army and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled a joint project that gen­er­als and sci­en­tists said could make fic­tion a real­ity within this decade.” 

CNet, on the other hand, plays it straight — pro­vid­ing good back­ground on nan­otech — while the Register gets deli­ciously mean.

May 25th, 2003 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.