When you think DARPA you think high tech military toys. Futuristic stuff for weapons and perhaps exoskeletons and such. I never really thought of human sciences. I thought that the drug testing and similar that was big in the military had died down, and DARPA was more high technology any ways. Well it seems they have gotten into biology and what makes a soldier tick. And Wired did an interesting article where they overview what the ideas are and go into detail about a device they made that actually increases stamina, and endurance. They call it the Glove:
[...] Grahn and his research partner, biologist Craig Heller, started working on the Glove at Stanford in the late 1990s as part of their research on improving physical performance. Even they were astounded at how well it seemed to work. Vinh Cao, their squat, barrel-chested lab technician, used to do almost 100 pull-ups every time he worked out. Then one day he cooled himself off between sets with an early prototype. The next round of pull-ups — his 11th — was as strong as his first. Within six weeks, Cao was doing 180 pull-ups a session. Six weeks after that, he went from 180 to more than 600. Soon, Stanford’s football trainers asked to borrow a few Gloves to cool down players in the weight room and to fight muscle cramps.
In 2001, Heller went to Darpa. The agency saw the potential of the Glove for training recruits; the Stanford researchers received their first funding in 2003 and got $3 million.
In trying to figure out why the Glove worked so well, its inventors ended up challenging conventional scientific wisdom on fatigue. Muscles don’t wear out because they use up stored sugars, the researchers said. Instead, muscles tire because they get too hot, and sweating is just a backup cooling system for the lattices of blood vessels in the hands and feet. The Glove, in other words, overclocks the heat exchange system. “It’s like giving a Honda the radiator of a Mack truck,” Heller says. After four months of using it himself, Heller did 1,000 push-ups on his 60th birthday in April 2003. Soon after, troops from Special Operations Command were trying out the Glove, too.
[Continue reading at Wired 15.03]
The article gets a bit into the nitty gritty, but the research seem interesting in a health type way. They aren’t talking steroids… but ways to keep the body at a state a person has brought it too. The work they’ve done on stamina is amazing.
Tags: Interesting, Military, Oddities, Science
