Darpa continues to innovate

For the last few years I've been telling people that Lexus has surpassed Darpa as the world's No. 1 technological innovator. With swiveling headlights, adaptive cruise control, and a hands-free parking system, it seemed warranted. But not so fast.

Darpa stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and prior to 1972 was just Arpa. Darpa has given us some great technology over the years, such as the internet (September 1969, to be precise). I've been following the agency's annual Grand Challenge, but I've fallen behind on the weird, black-ops stuff.

Wired magazine recently did a piece on some of Darpa's work on human performance enhancement. One of their projects will be really interesting for workout buffs, which I was right up until I decided watching TV and surfing the web were more entertaining. When hard-worked muscles give out, they've burned up all the sugar, right? Nope. They're overheating.

The lab is climate-controlled to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and 66 percent humidity. Sitting inside the cramped room, even for a few minutes, is an unpleasantly moist experience. I’ve spent the last 40 minutes on a treadmill angled at a 9 percent grade. My face is chili-red, my shirt soaked with sweat. My breath is coming in short, unsatisfactory gasps. The sushi and sake I had last night are in full revolt. The tiny speakers on the shelf blasting “Living on a Prayer” are definitely not helping.

Then Dennis Grahn, a lumpy Stanford University biologist and former minor-league hockey player, walks into the room. He nods in my direction and smiles at a technician. “Looks like he’s ready,” Grahn says.

Grahn takes my hand and slips it into a clear, coffeepot-looking contraption he calls the Glove. Inside is a hemisphere of metal, cool to the touch. He tightens a seal around my wrist; a vacuum begins pulling blood to the surface of my hand, and the cold metal chills my blood before it travels through my veins back to my core. After five minutes, I feel rejuvenated. Never mind the hangover. Never mind Bon Jovi. I keep going for another half hour.

[...]

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.

Here's an interesting bit about "de-animizing" humans, which essentially would cause a human to hibernate like a rodent in winter. That would give a trauma victim extra time to make it to the hospital. Darpa's black-ops roots come to light:

But before the program could start, DSO’s performance-enhancement push ran into trouble in Washington. The President’s Council on Bioethics was publishing reports decrying body hacks. Some in Congress worried about being accused of funding a Frankenstein army.

In response to those critics, the agency already predisposed to clandestine research — decided to go underground. Program names were changed to dull their mad-scientist edge. Metabolic Dominance became Peak Soldier Performance. Augmented Cognition became Improving Warfighter Information Intake Under Stress. Researchers were told to keep their mouths shut; many current and former program managers still won’t talk on the record, requesting anonymity for this story. The Surviving Blood Loss program, meant to fund Roth’s work, was itself put into suspended animation.

Links
Wired: Be More Than You Can Be
Darpa
Darpa Grand Challenge