By Bob Reinert for USAG-Natick Public Affairs
Capt. David DeGroot, Ph.D., puts volunteers into a water immersion tank at the U.S. Army Institute of Environmental Medicine at Natick Soldier Systems Center as part of a study that is looking at how Soldiers' bodies cool down. (By David Kamm,NSRDEC Photographer)
Seventeen years after four soldiers died from hypothermia during the final phase of Ranger School, researchers at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine at Natick Soldier Systems Center continue to study how the human body cools down, in hopes of one day developing medical techniques to help prevent such tragedies.
“You can’t design possible countermeasures — pharmacological treatments, perhaps — until you know mechanisms,” said Capt. David DeGroot, Ph.D., a research physiologist in USARIEM’s Thermal and Mountain Medicine Division, who is leading the study. “You’ve got to understand the basic mechanism before you (say), ‘Okay, now how do I target it?’
“This is going to allow us to get further insight with the actual mechanisms so that we can follow it up with, Okay, what could we possibly do in terms of an intervention to mitigate that rate of core temperature drop?”
Dr. John Castellani, serving as an Army captain with USARIEM at the time, was a member of the team that conducted the institute’s initial study at Camp Rudder on Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., soon after the February 1995 deaths. He still works at the institute as a research physiologist.
Castellani said that the original study led to adjustments to the tables Rangers use to determine what amount of exposure to cold is safe.
(more…)
From the Office of Naval Research
Steel may have met its match.
An Office of Naval Research (ONR)-funded project will produce a full-size ship hull section made entirely with marine grade titanium using a welding innovation that could help bring titanium into future Navy ship construction.
The contractor team building this section recently completed the industry’s longest friction-stir titanium alloy welds and aims to complete the ship hull section this summer. Friction stir welds more than 17 feet long joined the titanium alloy plates for the section’s deck.
“This fast, effective friction stir weld technique is now an affordable manufacturing process that takes advantage of titanium’s properties,” said Kelly Cooper, the program officer managing the project for ONR’s Sea Warfare and Weapons Department.
What it means for the Navy
Titanium metal and its alloys are desirable materials for ship hulls and other structures because of their high strength, light weight and corrosion-resistance. If constructed in titanium, Navy ships would have lighter weight for the same size—allowing for a bigger payload—and virtually no corrosion. But because titanium costs up to nine times more than steel and is technically difficult and expensive to manufacture into marine vessel hulls, it has been avoided by the shipbuilding industry.
But perhaps not for much longer.
From www.launch.org
The goal of the LAUNCH: Beyond Waste Challenge is to identify ten “game changing” innovations that have the potential to transform the current waste management systems and practices to ones focused on minimizing waste and/or transforming waste into new products.
LAUNCH invites proposals for innovative design for zero waste solutions, waste elimination, waste transformation, and waste mitigation technologies, as well as waste reduction-focused education, business, and financial strategies that have the potential to reduce and/or eliminate waste at a household, community, office building, campus, or industrial level.
The Waste Hierarchy establishes a ranking of management options in context of increasing environmental impact, and is based on the simple premise that it is better to avoid generating waste than to treat or dispose of waste.
The ultimate goal of LAUNCH is a sustainable future for planet Earth and its inhabitants. The LAUNCH: Beyond Waste Challenge seeks to identify entrepreneurial efforts focused on the development of innovative products, services, and programs that can benefit from collaborating and networking with influential government and business leaders to accelerate their deployment and adoption in both the developed and developing worlds.
By Tammy J. White, Office of Naval Research
(Photo courtesy Bill Johnson, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
Using research designed to protect warfighters from noise-induced hearing loss in the naval environment, the Office of Naval Research has joined the Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to turn down the volume at the nation’s power plants.
ONR will lend its extensive expertise in noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) to help identify noise sources and propose engineering controls at dams and hydroelectric plants nationwide as part of the interagency agreement.
“The Navy in general, and ONR in particular, is leading the curve when it comes to understanding the dangers of noise,” says Kurt Yankaskas, a program manager in ONR’s Warfighter Performance Department. “It’s a serious problem not only in the Navy and Marine Corps, but across modern society.”
The added project scope results in $14,000 in additional federal funding, bringing the total to $109,000, to evaluate and seek new controls for protecting plant workers from hearing damage sustained on the job.
Noise is a research area ONR knows all too well.
Local doctors in Iquitos conduct a follow-up visit with a young Peruvian child as part of NAMRU-6 project on febrile surveillance. (Courtesy of National Naval medical Research Unit 6)
In the field of ‘epidemic intelligence,’ public health experts often turn to formal and informal data sources to learn about disease events occurring around the world. Advances in technology have been largely responsible for spurring the ability to augment the type and nature of potential data sources.
For example, unstructured data gleaned from the Internet in near real-time can be of significant value in identifying cues or signals that may indicate a disease outbreak is occurring in somewhere in the world. This information can then be used to help guide response activities among public health officials when appropriate. The massive amount of data contained on the Internet, along with easy to use search tools and computerized language translation software, help make this work possible.
Websites hosted all over the world allow data to be uploaded from virtually anywhere – for instance, in the middle of the Congo with a cellular or satellite phone – making the Internet a very useful tool for discovering novel outbreaks. Where CNN and the BBC are less likely to provide news coverage, the multitude of non–English websites can provide access to information in remote towns in faraway places.
Surveillance of media and other Internet-based sites has become such a rapid method to learn about incipient outbreaks among humans, animals, and even plants, that agencies such as the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have specialized programs to do this work.
Photo slideshow by Ian Graham
Photo montage depicting the Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (LASR), a part of the Naval Research Laboratory, where they’re working toward creating viable solutions for problems service members might actually face. One of these is Damage Control for the 21st Century—a program to develop firefighting robots for use aboard Navy ships.
An operator wearing the Army-issued Extended Cold Weather Clothing Systems works with a Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, or WIN-T, Increment 2 Tactical Communications Node, Jan. 13, 2012, during the two-week WIN-T Increment 2 Cold Weather Natural Environments Testing at Fort Greely, Alaska. (U.S. Army photo)
Even after being frozen overnight at negative 35-degree temperatures in the severe winter conditions of Alaska, the elements of the Army’s second-generation tactical communications network backbone were up and running.
Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, or WIN-T, Increment 2, successfully completed its Cold Weather Natural Environments Testing in January at Fort Greely, Alaska, receiving positive test results in the execution and in its recently released test report from the Army’s Aberdeen Test Center. The data will be used to support a Full-Rate Production, or FRP, decision for WIN-T Increment 2, with a successful FRP decision providing the green light for the network’s fielding in Fiscal Year 2013.
“This was a very successful test and all of the equipment performed as we would have expected in extreme arctic conditions,” said Lt. Col. Robert Collins, product manager for WIN-T Increments 2 and 3. “Whether in the desert or in adverse cold environments, WIN-T Increment 2 will provide the needed on-the-move tactical network communications for maneuver elements on the battlefield all the way down the company level.”
The cold weather test sets the stage for WIN-T Increment 2′s formal operational test, which is the system’s final assessment prior to the full rate production decision.
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