DARPA GOAL: FOODLESS FIGHTERS

Soldiers’ moms will no doubt be hor­ri­fied. But the Pentagon is look­ing into ways for GIs to fight for up to five days — with­out eat­ing a sin­gle meal.
During a mis­sion, sol­diers in the field typ­i­cally don’t have the time, or the incli­na­tion, to chow down. That lack of food can affect their bat­tle­field per­for­mance. So Darpa, the U.S. military’s far-​​out research arm, wants sci­en­tists to fig­ure out if sol­diers can oper­ate at top lev­els — with­out lunch breaks.
“The ques­tion is: ‘Are there tem­po­rary bio­chem­i­cal approaches we can use to squeeze the last ounce of per­for­mance out of sol­diers when they’re already worked to exhaus­tion?’” said a Darpa life sci­ences con­sul­tant, who asked not to be named.
The agency has a cou­ple of ideas on how this might be done: A cock­tail of nutri­ents or so-​​called “nutraceu­ti­cals” could help build endurance. Lowering sol­diers’ core body tem­per­a­ture might keep them from over­heat­ing. Or, per­haps, the change could be made at the micro­scopic level, by turbo-​​charging mito­chon­dria — the cell’s energy sup­pli­ers.
The Darpa project, called “Metabolic Dominance” or “Peak Soldier Performance,” is part of a wider, future-​​facing Pentagon research push to develop grunts who are pretty much immune to nor­mal human demands.
My Wired News arti­cle has details.
THERE’S MORE: Darpa’s for­ays into bio­log­i­cal research have run into con­tro­versy in recent months. Last fall, the Senate tried to cut tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in agency pro­grams like the “Brain Machine Interface,” which has yielded star­tling results in using the mind to oper­ate robotic limbs. Much of that fund­ing was later restored. But the fight served as a “shot across the bow,” accord­ing to one agency con­trac­tor. And, as a result, Darpa has renamed most of its biol­ogy pro­grams, to make them sound less like sci­ence fic­tion, and more like mil­i­tary neces­si­ties. For exam­ple, “Persistence in Combat,” the project to keep injured G.I.s pulling the trig­ger on the bat­tle­field for days, is now known as “Soldier Self-​​Care.” “Metabolic Dominance” is slated to become “Peak Soldier Performance.“
AND MORE: Darpa has released the list of com­pa­nies and hos­pi­tals who have received “Peak Soldier Performance” grants. They are, accord­ing to spokesper­son Jan Walker: Mars Inc. /​ Oxford University /​ National Institutes of Health, Oklahoma State University, Munchi BioTherapeutics Inc., and Stanford University /​ Naval Health Research Center.“
AND MORE: The Army may have found a way to keep sol­diers from over-​​heating, New Scientist reports: “a new, light­weight cool­ing vest, using ammo­nia and pow­ered by hydro­car­bon fuel.”

Some wear­able cool­ing sys­tems already exist and are used by astro­nauts, for exam­ple. But these are based on pump­ing cooled water through the vest’s tubes. This requires sub­stan­tial power, mak­ing these sys­tems too heavy to be car­ried…
The new vest still employs water as a coolant, but uses a cool­ing sys­tem pow­ered by burn­ing hydro­car­bon fuel to remove the heat from the water.
Warm water in the vest’s tubes is pumped past an array of micro­scopic tubes — each about the width of a human hair — con­tain­ing liq­uid ammo­nia. The ammo­nia absorbs the water’s heat and vapor­ises, cool­ing the water. 

February 17th, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.