These flashbacks are one of the worst symptoms for many people who suffer from PTSD. Research team leader Dr. Emily Holmes concluded that when played soon after exposure to trauma, Tetris served as “a cognitive vaccine” that seemed to “inoculate against the build-up of flashbacks.” I guess in the future if you have a bad day and there something you would prefer to not recall, try playing some Tetris.

The study into using the game to treat PTSD followed 60 participants and exposed them to a movie showing scenes of injury and death. The participants were then divided into three groups. One of the groups sat quietly and did nothing, the other group took a computerized trivia quiz, and the third group played Tetris. The Tetris playing group reported fewer flashbacks according to the study. I’ve never been through anything like soldiers go through in the field, but it would seem to me being next people you know and care for who get gravely injured or killed would be much more likely to cause traumatic flashbacks than watching a movie.

I’m also not sure it would work for me if I had to be treated with Tetris because the game really drives me crazy at times.

[via Wired]

Most the UAVs we have take off and land like a normal airplanes. The Office of Naval Research has been sponsoring another UAV program called Flexrotor that is nothing like a conventional drone. The Flexrotor is a UAV that takes off and lands vertically like a helicopter, but transitions to horizontal flight of a fixed wing aircraft for cruising distance and speed.

Development of the Flexrotor entered its second stage, in which participating companies are working on the ability for the aircraft take off, land, and transition to horizontal flight in strong winds. This stage of the program will also see work continue on the automated maintenance system. The system will be able to take care of the maintenance of the aircraft such as refueling without any input from maintenance personnel, and will act as launch and landing pad.

[via Phys.org]

The students created their grappling hook gun for an Air Force competition. The device the team created uses a launcher to shoot a grappling hook as far as 90 feet in the air. Once deployed, the system uses pulleys, and other tech to automatically pull the user up the building or other surface with little effort.

The contest the team will be participating in gives them 20 minutes to demonstrate the tool and then train military representatives on its use. The goal of the competition is to get three people up a 90-foot vertical incline while carrying 300 pounds of gear each. The device designed by the BYU students is able to climb 30 feet per minute. Check out the video above to see the system in action.

Traditional body armor is made out of multiple layers of Kevlar with additional metal or ceramic plates for more protection. The problem is that this very thick body armor can weigh as much as 25 pounds adding to load a soldier has to carry in a hot climate leading to earlier fatigue. BAE has developed a new type of body armor that uses what it calls Shear Thickening Liquid that has special particles that are suspended inside the liquid.

The video clip below first shows 9mm bullets being fired into 10 layers of Kevlar combined with liquid armor, then the impact on 31 layers of Kevlar alone.

When a projectile like a bullet hits the liquid, the particles lock together and spread the impact of a bullet over a larger area. That means that body armor using the special liquid can be made thinner and lighter, yet more effectively spread an impact across the surface offering greater protection to the wearer. BAE believes that the new technology could reduce the overall thickness and weight of armor by as much as 45 percent, while increasing freedom of movement.

[via Fox News]

The surgery was performed at the University of Maryland Medical Center, and was paid for by the U.S. Navy as part of a program to develop techniques to help soldiers with facial injuries from combat recover. The surgery lasted 36 hours and gave Norris new teeth, nose, tongue, and jaw. Physicians say the man is now recovering well and has brushed his new teeth and shaved since the surgery.

As you can see from the photo above before and after the operation, the face transplant made a huge difference in the man’s appearance. Before the surgery, he lived as a recluse never leaving home. The doctor says that he’s also regained his sense of smell after the surgery. The surgery included transplanting nerves and underlying muscles as well. Norris will have to take anti-rejection medications for the rest of his life to keep his body from rejecting the transplanted tissues, but that’s a small price to pay for the amazing outcome of these modern medical efforts.

[via BBC]

This robot is cool because it’s rugged, able to survive 15 foot drops, and is small enough that it can be thrown through a window to get a look inside a building. The robot is also capable of self-righting if it lands upside-down, and can climb obstacles up to 7 inches tall. It has cameras on the front, back, and sides along with IR lights for seeing in lowlight environments.  The 110 can last for up to 10 hours per charge doing video monitoring, and up to six hours for moving around.

It appears to use some sort of touchscreen controller the operator wears on their arm. Until now, the 110 has been performing internal testing at iRobot. Now with the massive order of 100 units, the bot will get its first on-the-job “operational assessment.”

[via Engadget]

The LEGO airplane model is cool on its own, but the coolest thing about little Raptor model is that the pilot is actually a velociraptor. The LEGO plane reminds me a lot of caricature of a real jet with its somewhat bulbous proportions, but I still really like it. I know that if this was around my house, the kids would crash it repeatedly in some sort of horrendous flying accident.

The head of the raptor apparently came from one of the new LEGO dinosaur sets. This is cool with the military and dinosaur mashup going on. I don’t think that combo happens enough. What do you think?

[via Brothers Brick]

The U.S. Navy has test fired the first of two industry-built railgun prototypes. They had to use a very oddly shaped projectile that is not aerodynamic in the test so it would slow down quickly. The projectile looks sort of like an engine part to me and is a big and bulky thing. The Navy recorded one of the six test firings of the railgun constructed by BAE on video, and it’s pretty spectacular:

That is one the coolest videos I’ve seen from the military in a long time. I can only imagine how far an aerodynamic projectile would have traveled and the speeds it would’ve reached. The Navy plans to eventually fire an aerodynamic projectile from the weapon, with a goal distance of 220 nautical miles. You certainly would not want to be on the receiving end of that.

[via Navy Times]

This weapon, made by BAE Systems, is targeting a range of 50 to 100 nautical miles to start with and the Navy plans to increase the range 220 nautical miles. The railgun uses 32-megajoules of electromagnetic energy to fling a projectile down a pair of rails at anywhere from 4500 to 5600 mph. That is seriously hellafast.

In fact, it is so fast that explosives aren’t needed to destroy a target. No gunpowder, or high explosives, just pure raw speed and momentum will obliterate whatever that projectile hits. The Navy said to be in testing the new prototype this month while it waits for a second prototype to be delivered that is constructed by a different contractor, General Atomics. The day I can deer hunt with a railgun, will be the day I kill my first Bambi.

The 4 inch-long bullet was invented by Red Jones and Brian Kast, who aside from being engineers are also hunters. So if you hate this tech, blame the game that they couldn’t hit. Although to say that this is overcompensating would be an understatement: the high-tech ammo has an optical sensor, an 8-bit CPU that handles “guidance and control electronics” and electromagnetic actuators that control its fins.

The bullet is meant to be used with smooth-bore firearms, i.e. ones that don’t have grooves inside their barrels. The grooves give spin to normal bullets to help them fly straight, but since this bullet literally has a mind of its own it doesn’t need the spin. The screenshot above shows the path left by a prototype fitted with an LED, proving that its electronics and battery are not destroyed when the bullet is fired. That is one weird trajectory.

Sandia’s press release also said that the bullet’s flight gets steadier with distance, so it’s better suited for long-range targets. The current prototype isn’t up to the U.S. military’s standards in terms of velocity, but its inventors are confident that they can make it go faster by using customized gunpowder. Or they could invent bullet time. Check the link below for more details.

[via Sandia National Labs via BBC News]

The coolest of the projects that received grant money is one proposed by a team of scientists at Boston University that want to figure out if you can grow brown fat cells and then inject them into the human body as a way to boost metabolism and burn fat, leading to weight loss. The human body has both brown adipose tissue and white adipose tissue. The white fat cells make people obese, yet the brown fat cells help burn calories.

In fact, a recent study showed that a pockets of brown fat cells can burn as much as 250 calories in a three-hour time span. Those brown fat cells can even steal energy from white fat cells, further stunting obesity. The researchers hope to develop a method of growing those brown fat cells and injecting them into the body with the goal of helping overweight soldiers lose weight. You can bet that if the team is successful, this will also be highly profitable in the private sector with obese people looking for a way to lose weight.

[via Wired: Danger Room]

Most drones in the military arsenal have a pilot, even if that pilot is half a world away. The X-47B will be able to take off, find its target, attack, and return home and land all on its own using internal systems. While it’s still years away from being used in the field, the X-47B would be the first fully-unmanned aircraft system in the military.

Humans would still program flight plans and targets, but Northrop program manger Carl Johnson said, “It will do its own math and decide what it should do next.” Let’s hope the math is does comes up with an answer other than humans are a risk to its survival. While it is currently illegal for a machine to make its own military decisions, I don’t think Skynet really cares about such rules.

[via TheAtlanticWire]

Watch designs featured by Tokyoflash are usually extremely complicated, which makes reading the time off of them – which happens to be the main purpose of watches, by the way – more difficult than necessary. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised when I chanced upon the Trax MkII Concept Watch.

The watch was designed by Peter Fletcher from the UK, and draws on obvious military themes as its inspiration. That’s pretty much apparent as it uses tank-like treads to tell the time. Unlike other watch displays that flash a series of LED lights and leave all the time reading interpretation up to you, the Trax MkII tells it like it is: with good, old-fashioned digits.

As the time changes, the numbered treads move into position. Just read the numbers found between the LED illuminated brackets in the middle to know what time of day it is – in military time, of course.

On the design, Peter explains: “I wanted to come up with a watch design based on driven belts. The first thought that popped into my head when thinking about belts was caterpillar tracks and what caterpillar tracks are usually attached too. So I decided to use tanks as an inspiration for this watch concept.”

Execution of this particular design will require a fairly complex mechanism to be built, but if you’d like to see it produced some day, be sure to cast your vote over on the Tokyoflash design blog.

[via Ubergizmo via Geeky Gadgets]

The giant vehicles that the military uses are far from fuel-efficient and the more fuel they consume, the more fuel the military has to transport to wherever they are operating from. The more transportation runs to fuel up, the more soldiers are in harm’s way. Never mind the massive fuel expenses passed onto taxpayers. Clearly, saving fuel has many benefits in the military. This is why the Hummer is gong hybrid.

The full details on the vehicle known as the Fuel Efficiency Group Vehicle Demonstrator or FED Bravo are still classified. However, it is said to be a plug-in hybrid, using technology similar to the Chevy Volt. More details are known about the FED Alpha, a lightweight model which uses a solar panel to power its electrical system, and runs on a turbo 4-cylinder diesel engine, along with special tires which have a low rolling resistance. The vehicles are said to get the same performance as current Hummers and save 70% on fuel.

[via Inhabitat via Jalopnik]

According to the scientist, the RQ-170 Sentinel drone was forced to land where the Iranians wanted it to using a GPS hack. First, they blocked the GPS signals to the drone placing it into autopilot. Then the GPS hack fooled the drone into thinking it was somewhere it wasn’t.

The drone then landed of its own accord when the Iranians told it to and they had the complete and working drone in their possession. The crazy part is that apparently the military knew that this exact hack could compromise the drone all the way back in 2003.

[via C|Net via Gizmodo]

There are all sorts of robots in use within the military – some of them can roll around to fight with their own weapons, and others are designed to simply give a look at what is over a wall or around a corner.

The Army has purchased 315 ReconRobitics Recon Scout XT video reconnaissance robots that soldiers can throw up to 120 feet (and operate from as much as 300 feet away outdoors) to give them a look at what’s going on ahead of them. The tiny bots measure just 8 inches long and weigh just 1.3 pounds, and have gnarly looking spiked wheels so they can navigate difficult terrain. It even has an automated infrared mode for seeing in dark environments.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The Army also bought SearchStick accessories that allow the Recon Scout XT to be put on a stick and lifted up in the air to see over walls. Each of the Recon Scout XT bots can be deployed in just five seconds. It has a rechargeable battery and a single button controller for simplicity.

AlphaDog looks just like BigDog with the exception of being larger and having a higher payload capability and range. AlphaDog can carry up to 400 pounds of gear and has some other cool systems. Alpha has internal GPS and computer vision that allows it to follow along behind a solider automatically.

The US Marines and DARPA plan to put the AlphaDog through its paces next year. The thing still creeps me out. I can see it going bezerk and stomping all over my head. Check out the video to see AlphaDog in action.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via IEEE Spectrum]

Lockheed Martin has unveiled a new remote controlled drone based on the design of the maple seed. The Samarai drone is very compact and lightweight. It has two moving parts and camera on it and can fly using a remote control or a tablet app. Test flights for the drone took it up to about 30-feet in elevation, and proved that the concept works.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The drone can hover like a helicopter and can take off vertically in tight spots. It’s small enough to be deployed from a backpack and the pilot can launch the craft by throwing it like a boomerang. The thought is that the drone could some day be used by military and police to see what is going on over a wall, or in other hard to reach locations.

[via Navy Times]

Often in the military, how far a group of soldiers can wander from base depends on the amount of gear they can carry with them like water and food. They also have to contend with getting tired from carrying heavy packs as well. The military is now sending its cool Squad Mission Support System to Afghanistan to help take a load off the soldiers.

The Lockheed Martin produced, six-wheeled ATVs can navigate on their own and are able to carry the supplies that the soldiers need when on a mission or just hiking to the next point. The SMSS is the largest unmanned vehicle to ever be deployed with the army. It can be remote controlled, tele-operated, or manual controlled. In the future, the vehicles might be armed, and provide surveillance capabilities as well.

[via CNET]

Lockheed has said that at 32,000 feet the airship had some sort of issue and had to return to a “predetermined location” for landing. Either the person that determines the location for landing needs to be shot or there was nothing predetermined about where the HALE-D ended up.

The airship “landed” in a heavily wooded area in Pennsylvania. The area is apparently so densely wooded that Lockheed is working to figure out how to get the HALE-D back. The aircraft is said to be undamaged and no injuries are reported. The goal of the program is to create an airship that can hang in the air 12 miles above the ground with surveillance capabilities like a satellite at a much lower cost.

[via GizMag]