Soon, super soldiers that won't need food or sleep
ANI
London, August 13, 2012
First Published: 12:37 IST(13/8/2012)
Last Updated: 15:30 IST(13/8/2012)
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A US Marine (R) eats insects during a jungle survival program as part of the annual Cobra Gold 2012 combined military exercise at a navy base in Sattahip. AFP Photo/Pornchai Kittiwongsakul
Military researchers in America are working on projects involving gene manipulation, that will enable soldiers to live without food and sleep and allow those wounded in battle to heal quickly and even regrow limbs. "It may be seen as blue-sky thinking but it has teeth and plenty of money behind it," the Daily Express quoted Novelist Simon Conway, who was given unprecedented access to Washington's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as saying.

With funding of almost 2 billion pounds-a-year DARPA, established in 1958 after the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik shocked America, is working on an exoskeleton that will allow soldiers to run faster and lift heavy weights.

But its most revolutionary work is in gene manipulation .

"If you can efficiently convert fat into energy you don't need to feed your soldiers as often," Conway said.

"So you can send them into battle in remote areas plump and they live off their own fat.

"It is all about improving efficiency of energy creation in the body. Soldiers would be able to run at Olympic speeds, carry large weights and go without sleep and without food," he said.

The agency is also working out how to trigger cells to regrow limbs for soldiers, who are crippled by bombs.

"There is already a drug that allows people to shut off the trigger to sleep," Professor Joel Garreau, of Arizona State University, said.

"It was tested by the US army on helicopter pilots. They found that, after 40 hours, pilots actually had better concentration levels than if they'd rested.It is much better than amphetamines, which affect decision making and have led to many so-called friendly fire incidents," he said.

He confirmed that the agency was experimenting with turning fat to energy.

"The problem is that a Special Forces soldier burns 12,000 calories a day. You can't eat that much. Finding that metabolic switch would wipe out the 40 billion pounds diet industry in a heartbeat," Garreau said.

He said that the project to regrow limbs is being taken seriously.

"There are well-documented cases of young children losing a finger and it grows back.

"The trick is how to identify the trigger. Now it's a well-funded area of research," he added.

Lab-made skin to create robotic clones of man

Lab-made skin to create robotic clones of man
London: Researchers have claimed success in developing synthetic skin for robotic clone of humans, which resembles real people.

Researchers at Disney Research , Zurich, and Walt Disney Imagineering R&D have developed a new computational design process for cloning human faces that could greatly simplify the creation of synthetic skin for animatronic characters.
Animatronics are machines which seem animate rather than robotic. The figure is designed with exact dimensions and proportions of a living creature. It is mainly used in movie making, theme parks and other forms of entertainment .
The Zurich researchers have invented a computational method for automatically designing synthetic skin to match real individuals.
"With our method, we can simply create a robotic clone of a real person," researcher at Disney Research, Zurich Dr Bernd Bickel said.
The process starts by scanning 3D facial expressions from a human subject. Then, a novel optimisation scheme determines the shape of the synthetic skin as well as control parameters for the robotic head that provide the best match to the human subject.
This processing increases the realism of the resulting character, resulting in an animatronic face that closely resembles the human subject. Animatronics aims at creating physical robots that move and look like real humans.
"The custom digitally designed skin can be fabricated using injection molding and modern rapid prototyping technology. We 3D print a mold and use elastic silicon with properties similar to human skin as base material," Bickel added.
"This innovative research builds upon our heritage in 'Audio-Animatronics' pioneered by Walt Disney himself . Physical face cloning enables us to create personalized animatronic figures based on real individuals with a level of fidelity and realism never before possible," director of Disney Research, prof Markus Gross said.

Potato juice can help cure stomach ulcers: Study

LONDON: Potato contains unique antibacterial molecules that can treat stomach ulcers, a new study has claimed. Scientists from Manchester University have discovered that a key molecule in potato can both cure and prevent the bacteria that lives in the stomach and causes stomach ulcers and heartburn, the Daily Mail reported.

Unlike with antibiotics, the stomach bacteria cannot develop resistance to the 'potato juice' which also does not cause any side-effects .

Scientists carried out the test on different types of potatoes — discovering Maris Piper and King Edward varieties worked the best.

The process to extract the as yet unnamed molecule has now been patented, with hopes it could one day be sold as a supplement similar to probiotic yoghurt drinks.

"We see this potato juice as a preventative measure to stop stomach ulcers developing that people would take as part of a healthy lifestyle," Ian Roberts, professor of microbiology at the Faculty of Life Sciences, who worked on the discovery was quoted by the paper as saying.