Flying Spy Blimp/ Lockeed Martin

THE WAR ROOM: Most people don’t like to admit it, but the military is at the cutting edge of development of new technologies – from lasers to brain surgery. It’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a leading incubator of new ideas from high flying spy blimps to new remotely-controlled vehicles that may one day be at the center of the nation’s transportation system. We periodically check in to find out what’s on the fast track for the mad scientists and there are some interesting gizmos this month.

NOT THE HIDENBURG: The Army plans to send huge spy blimps to Afghanistan. The next time you are in Kabul on vacation, make sure to keep an eye out for the U.S. Army's Space and Missile Defense Command's giant blimp-like surveillance airship. Developed by Lockheed Martin, The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) is not your father’s blimp.

The LEMV will be 250 feet long, autonomous, and able to float at up to 20,000 feet for an impressive three weeks at a time. As for its surveillance capabilities, a 40-foot-long stretch behind the cockpit will house a selection of spy gear, including a motion sensor and radar. While the LEMV has yet to be built -- the contract will be awarded Oct. 1.

BRAIN SCIENCE: But that is child’s play compared to some of the major medical breakthroughs that DARPA is contributing to. It now plans brain implants that would help replace mental functions in wounded war fighters. The implants would use light pulses to activate certain brain regions and reroute brain-connector functions.

Wired Magazine’s Danger Room says that traumatic brain injuries affect as many as 20 percent of war fighters returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the Pentagon's whiz kids at DARPA have turned to optogenetic brain implants that use light pulses to control brain cells, and hopefully reroute brain activity.

Such brain implants made from electrodes or optical fibers would sit on the brain's surface and monitor the electrical signals sent among neurons. They would also beam light pulses to stimulate specific parts of the brain in response, and ideally help the brain function normally despite having damaged areas.

The appropriately-named REPAIR (Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery) project involves a team led by Stanford and Brown universities working with a two-year budget of $14.9 million. First up for the optogenetic tests are mice, rats and eventually monkeys.

Learning how to manage the human brain has been a top priority for DARPA in recent years, given the mad science lab's orders for technology such as cryogenic methods to freeze traumatic brain injury in its tracks. But they also seek to co-opt the brain's power for directly controlling prosthetic limbs usable by wounded war fighters. Even if this latest venture does not directly heal, it may at least help negate the effects of brain injuries so that it's as if they never existed.

STEM CELL GEL: And that’s just the half of it. Scientists have developed a gel that helps brains recover from traumatic injuries. It has the potential to treat head injuries suffered in combat, car accidents, falls, or gunshot wounds. Developed by Dr. Ning Zhang at Clemson University in South Carolina, the gel is injected in liquid form at the site of injury and stimulates the growth of stem cells there.

Brain injuries are particularly hard to repair, since injured tissues swell up and can cause additional damage to the cells. So far, treatments have tried to limit this secondary damage by lowering the temperature or relieving the pressure at the site of injury. However, these techniques are often not very effective.

More recently, scientists have considered transplanting donor brain cells into the wound to repair damaged tissue. This method has so far had limited results when treating brain injuries. The donor cells often fail to grow or stimulate repair at the injury site, possibly because of the inflammation and scarring present there. The injury site also typically has very limited blood supply and connective tissue, which might prevent donor cells from getting the nutrients they require.

Dr. Zhang's gel, however, can be loaded with different chemicals to stimulate various biological processes at the site of injury. In previous research done on rats, she was able to use the gel to help re-establish full blood supply at the site of brain injury. This could help create a better environment for donor cells.

In n a follow-up study, Dr. Zhang loaded the gel with immature stem cells, as well as the chemicals they needed to develop into full-fledged adult brain cells. When rats with severe brain injuries were treated with this mixture for eight weeks, they showed signs of significant recovery. The new gel could treat patients at varying stages following injury, and is expected to be ready for testing in humans in about three years.

NEW GRUNT GUNS: U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers will deploy with the XM-25 weapon this summer, so that they can shower enemies hidden inside buildings with lethal smart rounds. Veterans of the Afghanistan conflict who tried the weapon predicted it would be a "game changing" gun capable of taking out insurgents hidden behind cover.

Military.com reports that the XM-25 resembles a highly-sophisticated grenade launcher that fires laser-guided smart rounds. The laser gauges a distance to target and allows the war fighter to set where the round will detonate, adding or subtracting increments of 3 meters from the laser-spotted point. Then the scope tells a microchip inside the round how far it should travel before exploding.

Each Heckler & Koch-made 25mm round actually holds two warheads that pack more punch than the current 40mm grenade launchers. War fighters would basically have immediate, long-distance explosive firepower in rifle form, as opposed to having to wait on mortar strikes, artillery or air strikes.

All that high-tech gadgetry earned the XM-25 one of PopSci's Best of “What’s New” awards for 2009, but it doesn't come cheap, at $25,000 per weapon. Still, that may prove more cost-effective for rooting out embedded enemies compared to relying upon expensive Hellfire missiles fired from Apache attack helicopters. The Army plans call for full production to start in 2012 -- and an initial buy of 12,500 XM-25s.

36-DEGREE: And the guys with the new guns should be better prepared for combat. The Army is seeking a helmet-mounted radar system that will warn them of lurking threats before stumbling directly upon them.

It's often said that a soldier's greatest weapon is his head; now, the U.S. Army plans to sharpen that weapon, installing radar in troops' combat helmets, upgrading one of the oldest pieces of infantry armor into an effective tactical device.

The Helmet Mounted Radar Program aims to provide a near-360-degree field for Moving Target Indicator (MTI) radar sensors that is low-power and can detect a moving threat as far out as 25 meters. The sensor should be integrated into the combat helmet and weigh less than two-and-a-half pounds, with less than a pound mounted on the helmet itself.

CHALLENGES: The system will also have to emit a low enough dose of radiated power to not affect the health of the soldiers wearing the helmets or friendlies operating nearby. Since each soldier in a squad will have radar, and since individuals in a squad will presumably spend long amounts of time within one another's 25-meter range, the program presents engineers with some daunting technical challenges.

But the reward should be worth the investment. Radar can see through all kinds of opaque combat operations by-products, like smoke, dust, and, perhaps most importantly, darkness, granting extra awareness to soldiers fighting an insurgency whose favorite tactic seems to be ambush. The radar setups might also help ground troops see through dense foliage and walls, allowing soldiers to see lurking threats before walking headlong into them. Just how the radar is going to interface with the soldier is still unclear.

A head-up display seems logical but also cumbersome, so perhaps the radar system could integrate with future standard-issue tech, like the wrist-mounted displays that Army Research Labs is developing alongside Hewlett-Packard. Other questions also remain unresolved: how will a soldier differentiate a threat from the friendly blips generated by nearby squad members? Will other moving items set off excessive false positives, slowing operations as soldiers stop to clear stray cats and birds?

Helmet-mounted radar won't be ready for deployment for several years, so engineers have some time to iron out those wrinkles. When they're done, the Army hopes it will have a helmet that doesn't just protect the head, but feeds it a steady stream of battlefield awareness as well.

WHEELCHAIRS: On a non-miliatry front Toyota is working on new technology to assist those in wheelchairs with limited mobility. Experts say the new brainwave system is a marvel. The rider of the wheelchair wears a cap that sends signals via a brain-scan electroencephalograph (BSE) to a computer that analyzes the input to steer the chair in real time.

Other brainwave technology usually requires lengthy processing time, but the Toyota technology transmits in only 125 milliseconds -- a crucial factor allowing faster reaction time. The technology, developed by a Japanese company called Riken, adjusts to the individual user's commands for movements such as forward, left and right, and stop.

In tests, Toyota says the commands are 95 percent accurate, which makes it the most accurate brainwave-driven controller in the world. The controller uses a technique called blind signal separation, which filters out extraneous brain signals from those intended to control the chair's movement. The technology has implications for other medical applications beyond wheelchair control; according to Toyota, it could ultimately be extended to control the actions of robots or to adjust to the emotions and mental state of patents.