BuzzSkyline writes "Improvements in helmets have helped modern soldiers survive bullets and blasts that would have killed them in past wars. But increasing numbers of soldiers are suffering long lasting brain damage from explosions, partly as a result of what appears to be a flaw in helmet designs. Although the blast itself may not accelerate the brain inside a soldier's head enough to cause injury, shockwaves that make it through the space between a helmet and a soldier's head can cause the skull to flex, leading to ripples in the skull that can create damaging pressures in the brain. Simulations that relied on 'code originally designed to simulate how a detonated weapon rattles a building or tank' could lead to new helmets that reduce the traumatic brain injuries that many soldiers suffer as a result of improvised explosive devices and other moderate-sized blasts. The research is due to be published in Physical Review Letters, but a pre-print of the entire article is currently available on the Physics ArXiv."
A truely scientific study would measure the amount of brain damage a person had prior to entering the military and figure out how to discount brain damage accrued as a result of non-combat related factors associated with being in the military.
I think that a scientific study for determining just how much military helmets actually contribute to brain damage when the soldier is exposed to an explosion would start by base-lining the brain conditions of 50 or so soldiers. Then, expose them all to the same explosion at the same stand-off orientation, half of them wearing helmets and half without. Then, re-test.
If the guys without their helmets on come out behind the guys wearing helmets, we should re-title this, "Military Helmet Design Fails to Completely Prevent Brain Damage".
Still, if they can model it up and do better, that sounds great.
You know, observational studies are still scientific. There are plenty of hypotheses that can be tested without randomized controlled trials.
You're not going to claim that if astronomers really wanted to be scientific, they would start their research by gathering up a bunch of hydrogen and piling it together in empty space and then watching what happens, are you?
It's also entirely possible your test methodology would fail. The helmet could well be preventing acute injury resulting in death (shrapnel through the skull), but increasing the diffuse brain damage to other parts of the brain. However, the death due to acute injury would make the diffuse injury rate difficult to determine. Preventing death but causing brain damage is clearly an improvement, but it doesn't mean the helmet merely "failed to completely prevent" the brain damage, if the brain damage wouldn't have occurred without it.
Sometimes science is hard. It's still science, though, even if your "ideal" test methodology is impractical.
I think he's just complaining that "contributing" isn't really fair. It implies that brain damage would be less if no helmets were worn. This is obviously false, as the helmet prevents, not contributes to, brain damage.
No, it isn't obviously false, because it is possible that a poor helmet design could increase brain damage in situations where without the helmet a lesser amount or no damage would occur.
In fact based on their simulations they believe that this is the case, that the helmet can actually act as a funnel for the shockwave and increase the force felt by the skull. Based on the fact that it is a simulation, I'm sure they pile up enough "could"s or "possibly"s to make even the most nitpicky slashdotter happy, and thus the claim is completely fair.
I think a lot of this stems from the way the current helmet is fitted to the soldiers head. (Yes, I am a soldier, 18th Airborne Corp, Ft Bragg, NC)
1 - The older Kevlar helmet was fitted to your head with a "sweat band" strapped to the inside of the helmet, which could be adjusted to fit your head exactly.
2 - The newer ACH (Advanced Combat Helmet) is fitted with velcro backed pads which attach inside the helmet.
Let me say now that it is *very* common for CIF (where you get issued your equipment) to be out of your size and give you the next size up. With the older Kevlar (case 1 above) you could still fit the sweat band to fit your head, securing the helmet. With the ACH (case 2 above) if the helmet is too big, the pads will be loose on your head, and the helmet will rattle around on your head when concussions occur nearby.
Do you have any choice whatsoever in the gear you are issued?
No. In some cases you might be able to scrounge a piece of older gear, or if it was issued to you because you were in before the new gear came out you might have been able to hold onto it (sometimes they want to collect all the old stuff). But even in those cases, if the new stuff is sufficiently different in appearance, you might get in trouble for being "out of uniform". How likely that is depends on how much time your leaders have to fuss about such things, and their time or interest in such crap tends to decrease rapidly as you get closer to active combat operations.
My read was exactly the same. The helmets are now so much better at protecting heads than anything ever has been in the past, that we're having to model air pressure caused skull flex in order to find something to make better. That's fantastic! Not too long ago the trauma was more likely to be a piece of a bomb going through the brain that caused the damage.
And yeah -- anything they can do to make them better is a good thing, but lets applaud how far they've come.
The only thing I'd add, is that if we could find a way to have less soldiers in the way of bombs and bullets, we could be less aggressive on helmet designs too. Ah well.
Here's the hitch: Service personnel are screened rather thoroughly for any potentially disqualifying medically significant incidents prior to being enlisted/commissioned. Almost any prior head trauma for which medical attention was sought would be a disqualifying factor, unless medical review showed (with a very high degree of certainty) no lasting impairment. As a result, while a few might slip through the cracks here and there, you're not going to find a significant number of personnel entering the service with prior brain damage. You might be surprised what sort of prior medical issues can disqualify someone from military service.
I was underweight for my height (5'10" / 115 lbs). After spending 6 months trying to gain weight, was able to get a waver and go in to basic. 4 years later, had managed to gain 12 lbs. Out on the flight line, they called me Stickman. I was able to get in through small access holes (KC-135's) and fix stuff that would have taken an extra hour of work to remove larger pieces of skin. Got a decent amount of free booze for helping speed up repairs.
War really does lead to some of our race's biggest advances.
Ants don't build a better anthill after you kick it over, they just build the same old design as before.
Wrong race. Our race tends to come up with new and innovative ways of killing each other so that we can avoid being killed. And, if you want to stick to structures, Munich is a really interesting place to visit. They pretty much did rebuild the same human ant-hills after they got bombed to the ground. My understanding is that they built it about as close to the original lay-out as practical. But, even in that single very unusual example, they at least had the sense to completely revamp the infrastructu
Helmets which "have helped modern soldiers survive bullets and blasts that would have killed them in past wars" are being accused of causing brain damage.
I guess boxing gloves cause brain damage, too? Or maybe it's boxing that causes brain damage, and the gloves reduce the risk...
Now, if they can make better helmets that reduce the risk of brain damage even further, props to them. That doesn't mean the current generation of helmets are "causing" brain damage.
Maybe our helmets need a warning label: War may be hazardous to your health and has been known to cause such side effects as brain damage, PTSD, maiming, and death in many people during and after exposure.
The depleted uranium in a M1 Tank Armor is encased in steel. It does not "coat" the tank
The crew is not going to be exposed to the uranium unless the armor gets penetrated. If the armor is penetrated the crew has bigger problems.
Even then, it is not a big risk it will be penetrated, Of almost 5,000 M1 tanks built, only 10-12 tanks lost due to enemy action have had their armor penetrated. Only 7 soldiers have died in combat in an M1, 4 of those drowned when their tank collapsed a bridge.
The crew members smoking or chewing tobacco is far greater cancer risk than the tank armor.
Uranium is an alpha emitter, outside the body it's radiation is harmless as the alpha particles have little penetration and can't effect living tissue, inside the body is the opposite, very hazardous because the radiation is completely absorbed by living tissue.
"Gulf War Syndrome, or GWS, is the term which has been applied to the multi-symptom rheumatic disorder experienced by many veterans of the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf war. A similar disorder appeared in 1990-1991-era personnel who were never deployed to the Persian Gulf theater of operations and also in other military personnel, including participants in the Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program, or AVIP, which was inaugurated in 1997. No data has ever suggested that the disorder experienced by the deployed 1990-1991 soldiers is different from the disorder experienced by the other groups of patients, but the other cases have not been considered to be cases of GWS.
Squalene was found by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in five lots of the AVIP anthrax vaccine. The discovery of serum anti-squalene antibodies and the development of a test to detect these antibodies has made it possible to see that links appear to exist between the contaminated AVIP vaccine lots, the illness experienced by post-1997 vaccine recipients, the illness experienced by non-deployed 1990-1991-era patients, and the illness in deployed 1990-1991-era patients that has been referred to as GWS."
Unlikely. I have no idea if it's a real disease or not, or a popular misdiagnosis for a lot of other unrelated things. However, a great number of Gulf War Syndrome cases are with personnel who were not exposed to combat. Airmen on airbases, logistics folks, troops who never saw any real resistance in action, etc., etc.
In other words, not a lot of soldiers were exposed to explosions at close range, and a great many more folks than that tiny cross section reported GWS.
If it's real, it would have to be caused by something either pathogenic (unlikely, given that it seems the disease was not brought back home and spread to others) or environmental.
Environmental causes seem more likely because of the sheer number of possible candidates.
Burning oil wells, and the chemical muck that produced
The first wide scale use of depleted uranium munitions
Exposure to chemical weapons. Although chemical erapons were not deployed by Iraq during the war, some troops were exposed incidentally when storage facilities were destroyed.
Chemical agents and vaccines used to protect against chemical and biological weapons
All of these are suspect. There are studies saying yes, and no to most, if not all of these possible sources. Compound that with the real probability, that even if it's real, a great number of cases are probably folks who are scared and have some other disorder, who have convinced themselves otherwise, on top of the unscrupulous folks who are trying to turn this into a personal payday... we may never know if it's real, let alone what causes it if it is.
Actually, the gloves DO cause brain damage. It's nearly impossible to knock someone our bare handed with a blow to the temple, but easy as hell with gloves. The glove protects the hands, not the face. Notice that in college or olympic boxing they wear protective gear on their heads?
It's nearly impossible to knock someone our bare handed with a blow to the temple
While perhaps this is true for the temple (and only the temple), I have seen way to many UFC fights to agree with the general idea of this statement. Catch the jaw just right with a solid blow and just about anyone will go down.
The gloves lessen the blow, but they also make it possible to sustain a fight for 10 rounds... that is where the damage occurs. Getting knocked out isn't that big of a deal, it's the repeated blows that mess you up.
The gloves lessen the blow, but they also make it possible to sustain a fight for 10 rounds... that is where the damage occurs. Getting knocked out isn't that big of a deal, it's the repeated blows that mess you up.
You'd be surprised how many perfectly intelligent people fail to understand that. I watch a lot of UFC/MMA, but have never liked boxing. People who know I'm into UFC but don't really grasp the sport get confused when I tell them that I don't like boxing because it's too brutal. Our brains just weren't meant to be pummeled like that - Especially for those kind of durations. You often see UFC fighters get knocked loopy and wander off exhausted and beaten, but rarely do you see one truly punch-drunk.
They also make it possible to hit the head. Without gloves you'd break your hands if you stood there punching at somebody's head. In the old days of bare-knuckle boxing most of the blows were to the body. There were a lot of bruised ribs but hardly anybody died.
Actually, the gloves DO cause brain damage. It's nearly impossible to knock someone our bare handed with a blow to the temple, but easy as hell with gloves. The glove protects the hands, not the face. Notice that in college or olympic boxing they wear protective gear on their heads?
Well, I have professional Muay Thai experience and I'd agree with the gloves causing brain damage. However, as far as the general consensus goes, thats because of the gloves flexing and causing vibrations in your head. As well as that you can get hit a lot in the head, I read that it's better to get a hard blow and get knocked out than lots of small ones.
Interestingly, I know a lot of sparring partners who dont like sparring in head-gear because they often feel more dizzy afterwards than without. They attribute this to the gear giving even more padding for the vibrations.
When it comes to it being nearly impossible to knock someone out bare-handed I gotta disagree. It's got more to do with where you hit, and how prepared the opponent is. As they say, it's the one you dont see that'll knock you out. Obviously there are several other factors as well.
In MMA they wear minimal protection on the hands and people get knocked out just fine.
I guess boxing gloves cause brain damage, too? Or maybe it's boxing that causes brain damage, and the gloves reduce the risk...
Boxing gloves cause more damage than they prevent.
Boxing gloves are meant to protect a boxer's hands, not his opponent's head. They do that so well that a modern boxer can keep dishing out hurt long after an early 19th century bare-knuckles boxer would have had both hands incapacitated by his own blows.
Which allows the boxer to do more damage to his opponent, thus increasing the
From TFA: "The helmet acts as a windscoop, so the pressure between the skull and helmet is larger than the blast wave by itself,.."
With a direct gunshot to the head the head saves their lives, but with indirect shockwaves (i.e. an IED going off a few meters away) the helmets have been shown to increase the likelihood of a TBI.
Helmets which "have helped modern soldiers survive bullets and blasts that would have killed them in past wars" are being accused of causing brain damage.
Yes. Because they do. The net effect on survivability may be positive, but they still appear to cause specific kinds of brain injuries.
Observing that this is the case and understanding it is the first step to designing helmets that have the same beneficial features as current helemts without while eliminating or mitigating the injury-causing features, thus
Maybe it should have been "explosions cause brain damage and the helmet is not very efficient against those" or "don't wear a military helmet and use TNT"
I tought helmets were designed to protect from debri and flying objects caused by explosions, not the shockwave from 2 pounds of C-4 lying around.
There was just an article earlier today (Orange Goo [slashdot.org]) about a material that helps absorb shock, so why not line the inside of the helmets with the stuff?
Well, the helmets are designed primarily to be bullet resistant. One of the features it has that makes it bullet resistant is that the helmet doesn't sit on your head, it sits on a web suspension, and the helmet itself surrounds your head by about 1.3cm. That gap helps prevent rounds from penetrating the helmet.
What the study is saying is that the same gap, put there on purpose because it's beneficial against bullets and shrapnel, allows the shockwave blast from an explosion to be more effective against the skull and brain than helmets without the gap.
So now the next generation of helmets will likely try to find a happy balance between the gap, and perhaps some kind of foam solution as the article discusses. It's just more data to further refine designs with for the next generation of this particular technology.
I remember reading a similar article about motorcycle helmets, which said that the incident of brain trauma was higher in helmeted riders versus helmetless. Same reason - the rigid helmet transmitted shockwave straight through the skull to the brain, where the facial structure absorbed a lot of the shock in unhelmeted riders.
So the choice seemed to be pretty and brain damaged, or ugly and smart.
I think they've redesigned the helmets since then.
This is completely false. Idiot people who don't want to have to wear a helmet continue to bring that nonsense up. Think about it. How can a helmet which spreads an impact out over a large space *and* absorbs impact via padding be worse than no helmet at all.
So the choice seemed to be pretty and brain damaged, or ugly and smart.
I think they've redesigned the helmets since then.
I think the choice was more like "pretty, possibly brain-damaged, but ALIVE" and "face ground off by asphalt and DEAD".
I have personally witnessed two motorcycle accidents... In the first one, the guy dumped his bike while making a tight turn at a rain-slicked intersection. His (helmeted) head hit the pavement hard. Probably wouldn't have killed him, but he would definitely not have been getting up to ride after that without a helmet. Second one, the poor bastard hit a deer at about 70mph. Cut the thing right in two, and he slid on the highway for a while. I stopped to help him, and I saw up-close how badly chewed-up his helmet was. Lucky for him he wasn't one of those assholes who rides wearing nothing but shorts and a t-shirt. His gloved hands were a bit bloody, his knee was probably broken, and his helmet had been worn down in one spot so far that I could see the internal layers. But he was alive.
I know you were talking about older bike helmet designs, but I hate to see anything that could give no-helmet idiots more fuel for rationalizing their stupidity and selfishness.
shockwaves that make it through the space between a helmet and a soldier's head
Either Jarhead isn't wearing his helmet properly or there IS a major flaw in the design. This kind of thing is mentioned everywhere.
Have you ever worn a bike helmet that was 3 sizes too large? How effective was it? Heres an experiment, place a ball on the ground and smack it with your hand. Notice how much it bounces, moves, etc etc. Now take that ball and hold it 2 feet off the ground. Now hit it, and see how much more it bounces.
If the helmet has an inch of gap, its no surprise that helmets are hitting troops with more effective damage then if they were wearing nothing at all.
In the first world war German soldiers found that the spikes on their pointy helmets tended to get caught on things like tree branches, bunker roofs and occasionally each other.
The Bavarians came up with an ingenious solution - put the spike on the inside. As an added bonus it stopped them falling off.
IED = improvised explosive device. As opposed to an explosive device made on a production line somewhere. The military loves acronyms even more than the rest of government, so I doubt there's any Orwellian reason for the name.
So what is it when it's made from artillery shells?
I'll bet there's an army manual somewhere which says so. Probably if the artillery shells are used as artillery shells, they're not considered IEDs, but if they're rigged as a claymore, they are. Sort of like if you somehow hooked a billiard ball to your mouse to make a trackball, you'd have an IPD -- improvised pointing device.
Actually, while there is plenty of military doublespeak that could be dispensed with, "IED" I am perfectly happy with. "Improvised" is a worthwhile adjective to use in this context, because the improvised devices do typically have different characteristics from the closest equivalent professionally made devices, so you want to use that or some other adjective (you could use "home made" if you like, but that sounds like you're talking about pie, not weaponry). And since the term covers a range of blast, shrapnel, and incendiary devices, "explosive device" pretty much covers it. For once, it's actually a concise and descriptive acronym.
Actually, there's some very good reasons for calling them IEDs. IED stands for Improvised Explosive Device, of course. What this means is that the explosive device in question is not standard. This matters when it comes to disarming/making them safe.
If a EOD guy comes across an unexploded MK82, he knows precisely how to disarm it - it's standardized. Same deal with most land mines*, claymore devices, unmodified artillery shells**, and the rest of the world's standard military munitions. We even have books on foreign country's stuff, including Russian and old USSR weapons.
Each IED, even if from the same maker, is far more unique, presenting unique challanges when it comes to disarming them.
Oh, and being designated as a land mine doesn't mean a 'large enough' payload, it means it's buried in the ground with an appropriate sensor/detonator to explode when something's over it. Most are pressure sensitive, some anti-vehicle types have magnetic detonators.
Bombs are generally assumed to be dropped out of planes, but then I'm Air Force.
*Though booby-trapping can be an issue with these. **Many are converted into IEDs via non-conventional detonation systems in Iraq/Afghanistan.
The part that they perhaps should have mentioned is that in the TFA they compared the new helmets with the helmets they stopped using in 2003. They found that there is a gap in the new helmet which makes it handle bullets better than the old one, but it seems to handle explosions worse.
Basically, it's not that the helmet is causing brain damage. It's that the helmet is not protected the soldier from brain damage as well as the older helmet did.
Logic. Specifically, journalistic logic. An accurate title would be boring, so logically you create a title that is more interesting and is also based on words found in the article. Duh.
David Moore, a vascular neurologist and the deputy director of research at the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, headquartered in Washington, D.C., said that the skull flexure mechanism proposed by the physicists is just one hypothesis among several competing concepts of blast waves and injury. "Like all these hypotheses theres yet work to be done in terms of validation," he said. "There are too many unknown variables from the constitutive properties of brain and skull at high strain rates alon
Certainly it's possible, they just need better shock absorption. The current design transmits too much of the shock to the skull.
This problem is actually caused by the helmet's method of not transmitting shock to the skull. FTA:
To protect soldiers from bullets and shrapnel, modern helmet design maintains a 1.3-cm gap between helmet and head; in the simulation, the blast wave washed into the helmet through this gap. "The helmet acts as a windscoop, so the pressure between the skull and helmet is larger than the blast wave by itself," King said. While the ACH's pads mostly prevented this underwash, they also passed on forces to the skull.
So the trick is keeping the overpressure out of the helmet, while keeping it separated from the skull. Perhaps a dual helmet design; Rigid outer shell to absorb and deflect impact, and a second separate inner covering to resist overpressure. Either that, or in place of ACH pads, some type of system relying on fluid dynamics to redirects force forward, out the face of the helmet, rather than inward toward the skull.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
I think that a scientific study for determining just how much military helmets actually contribute to brain damage when the soldier is exposed to an explosion would start by base-lining the brain conditions of 50 or so soldiers. Then, expose them all to the same explosion at the same stand-off orientation, half of them wearing helmets and half without. Then, re-test.
If the guys without their helmets on come out behind the guys wearing helmets, we should re-title this, "Military Helmet Design Fails to Completely Prevent Brain Damage".
Still, if they can model it up and do better, that sounds great.
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, observational studies are still scientific. There are plenty of hypotheses that can be tested without randomized controlled trials.
You're not going to claim that if astronomers really wanted to be scientific, they would start their research by gathering up a bunch of hydrogen and piling it together in empty space and then watching what happens, are you?
It's also entirely possible your test methodology would fail. The helmet could well be preventing acute injury resulting in death (shrapnel through the skull), but increasing the diffuse brain damage to other parts of the brain. However, the death due to acute injury would make the diffuse injury rate difficult to determine. Preventing death but causing brain damage is clearly an improvement, but it doesn't mean the helmet merely "failed to completely prevent" the brain damage, if the brain damage wouldn't have occurred without it.
Sometimes science is hard. It's still science, though, even if your "ideal" test methodology is impractical.
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Re:In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
I think he's just complaining that "contributing" isn't really fair. It implies that brain damage would be less if no helmets were worn. This is obviously false, as the helmet prevents, not contributes to, brain damage.
No, it isn't obviously false, because it is possible that a poor helmet design could increase brain damage in situations where without the helmet a lesser amount or no damage would occur.
In fact based on their simulations they believe that this is the case, that the helmet can actually act as a funnel for the shockwave and increase the force felt by the skull. Based on the fact that it is a simulation, I'm sure they pile up enough "could"s or "possibly"s to make even the most nitpicky slashdotter happy, and thus the claim is completely fair.
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Opinion of a Soldier (Score:5, Informative)
I think a lot of this stems from the way the current helmet is fitted to the soldiers head. (Yes, I am a soldier, 18th Airborne Corp, Ft Bragg, NC)
1 - The older Kevlar helmet was fitted to your head with a "sweat band" strapped to the inside of the helmet, which could be adjusted to fit your head exactly.
2 - The newer ACH (Advanced Combat Helmet) is fitted with velcro backed pads which attach inside the helmet.
Let me say now that it is *very* common for CIF (where you get issued your equipment) to be out of your size and give you the next size up. With the older Kevlar (case 1 above) you could still fit the sweat band to fit your head, securing the helmet. With the ACH (case 2 above) if the helmet is too big, the pads will be loose on your head, and the helmet will rattle around on your head when concussions occur nearby.
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Re:Opinion of a Soldier (Score:4, Informative)
Do you have any choice whatsoever in the gear you are issued?
No. In some cases you might be able to scrounge a piece of older gear, or if it was issued to you because you were in before the new gear came out you might have been able to hold onto it (sometimes they want to collect all the old stuff). But even in those cases, if the new stuff is sufficiently different in appearance, you might get in trouble for being "out of uniform". How likely that is depends on how much time your leaders have to fuss about such things, and their time or interest in such crap tends to decrease rapidly as you get closer to active combat operations.
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That is "dead" on (Score:5, Insightful)
My read was exactly the same. The helmets are now so much better at protecting heads than anything ever has been in the past, that we're having to model air pressure caused skull flex in order to find something to make better. That's fantastic! Not too long ago the trauma was more likely to be a piece of a bomb going through the brain that caused the damage.
And yeah -- anything they can do to make them better is a good thing, but lets applaud how far they've come.
The only thing I'd add, is that if we could find a way to have less soldiers in the way of bombs and bullets, we could be less aggressive on helmet designs too. Ah well.
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was underweight for my height (5'10" / 115 lbs). After spending 6 months trying to gain weight, was able to get a waver and go in to basic. 4 years later, had managed to gain 12 lbs. Out on the flight line, they called me Stickman. I was able to get in through small access holes (KC-135's) and fix stuff that would have taken an extra hour of work to remove larger pieces of skin. Got a decent amount of free booze for helping speed up repairs.
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The Shadow were right... (Score:4, Insightful)
War really does lead to some of our race's biggest advances.
Although they did fail to consider the motivating potential of porn as well. Stupid Shadows...
Re:The Shadow were right... (Score:4, Funny)
That's true, although porn leads to head-flexing as well.
And dain bramage!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
War really does lead to some of our race's biggest advances.
Ants don't build a better anthill after you kick it over, they just build the same old design as before.
Wrong race. Our race tends to come up with new and innovative ways of killing each other so that we can avoid being killed. And, if you want to stick to structures, Munich is a really interesting place to visit. They pretty much did rebuild the same human ant-hills after they got bombed to the ground. My understanding is that they built it about as close to the original lay-out as practical. But, even in that single very unusual example, they at least had the sense to completely revamp the infrastructu
That's a bit harsh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Helmets which "have helped modern soldiers survive bullets and blasts that would have killed them in past wars" are being accused of causing brain damage.
I guess boxing gloves cause brain damage, too? Or maybe it's boxing that causes brain damage, and the gloves reduce the risk...
Now, if they can make better helmets that reduce the risk of brain damage even further, props to them. That doesn't mean the current generation of helmets are "causing" brain damage.
Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's 'causing' the brain damage in a way that it prevents the solder from dying and thus hiding the symptoms of the brain damage :)
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Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if this may be the cause of "Gulf War Syndrome" we heard a lot about a few years back...
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Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe our helmets need a warning label: War may be hazardous to your health and has been known to cause such side effects as brain damage, PTSD, maiming, and death in many people during and after exposure.
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Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:5, Informative)
The crew is not going to be exposed to the uranium unless the armor gets penetrated. If the armor is penetrated the crew has bigger problems.
Even then, it is not a big risk it will be penetrated, Of almost 5,000 M1 tanks built, only 10-12 tanks lost due to enemy action have had their armor penetrated. Only 7 soldiers have died in combat in an M1, 4 of those drowned when their tank collapsed a bridge.
The crew members smoking or chewing tobacco is far greater cancer risk than the tank armor.
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Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:4, Informative)
Uranium is an alpha emitter, outside the body it's radiation is harmless as the alpha particles have little penetration and can't effect living tissue, inside the body is the opposite, very hazardous because the radiation is completely absorbed by living tissue.
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Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder if this may be the cause of "Gulf War Syndrome" we heard a lot about a few years back...
How would a shock to the head cause auto-immune diseases, which is what Gulf War Syndrome is?
http://www.autoimmune.com/GWSGen.html [autoimmune.com]
"Gulf War Syndrome, or GWS, is the term which has been applied to the multi-symptom rheumatic disorder experienced by many veterans of the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf war. A similar disorder appeared in 1990-1991-era personnel who were never deployed to the Persian Gulf theater of operations and also in other military personnel, including participants in the Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program, or AVIP, which was inaugurated in 1997. No data has ever suggested that the disorder experienced by the deployed 1990-1991 soldiers is different from the disorder experienced by the other groups of patients, but the other cases have not been considered to be cases of GWS.
Squalene was found by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in five lots of the AVIP anthrax vaccine. The discovery of serum anti-squalene antibodies and the development of a test to detect these antibodies has made it possible to see that links appear to exist between the contaminated AVIP vaccine lots, the illness experienced by post-1997 vaccine recipients, the illness experienced by non-deployed 1990-1991-era patients, and the illness in deployed 1990-1991-era patients that has been referred to as GWS."
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Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlikely. I have no idea if it's a real disease or not, or a popular misdiagnosis for a lot of other unrelated things. However, a great number of Gulf War Syndrome cases are with personnel who were not exposed to combat. Airmen on airbases, logistics folks, troops who never saw any real resistance in action, etc., etc.
In other words, not a lot of soldiers were exposed to explosions at close range, and a great many more folks than that tiny cross section reported GWS.
If it's real, it would have to be caused by something either pathogenic (unlikely, given that it seems the disease was not brought back home and spread to others) or environmental.
Environmental causes seem more likely because of the sheer number of possible candidates.
All of these are suspect. There are studies saying yes, and no to most, if not all of these possible sources. Compound that with the real probability, that even if it's real, a great number of cases are probably folks who are scared and have some other disorder, who have convinced themselves otherwise, on top of the unscrupulous folks who are trying to turn this into a personal payday... we may never know if it's real, let alone what causes it if it is.
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Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the gloves DO cause brain damage. It's nearly impossible to knock someone our bare handed with a blow to the temple, but easy as hell with gloves. The glove protects the hands, not the face. Notice that in college or olympic boxing they wear protective gear on their heads?
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Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's nearly impossible to knock someone our bare handed with a blow to the temple
While perhaps this is true for the temple (and only the temple), I have seen way to many UFC fights to agree with the general idea of this statement. Catch the jaw just right with a solid blow and just about anyone will go down.
The gloves lessen the blow, but they also make it possible to sustain a fight for 10 rounds... that is where the damage occurs. Getting knocked out isn't that big of a deal, it's the repeated blows that mess you up.
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Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:4, Insightful)
The gloves lessen the blow, but they also make it possible to sustain a fight for 10 rounds... that is where the damage occurs. Getting knocked out isn't that big of a deal, it's the repeated blows that mess you up.
You'd be surprised how many perfectly intelligent people fail to understand that. I watch a lot of UFC/MMA, but have never liked boxing. People who know I'm into UFC but don't really grasp the sport get confused when I tell them that I don't like boxing because it's too brutal. Our brains just weren't meant to be pummeled like that - Especially for those kind of durations. You often see UFC fighters get knocked loopy and wander off exhausted and beaten, but rarely do you see one truly punch-drunk.
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Gloves make boxing *MUCH* more dangerous (Score:5, Informative)
They also make it possible to hit the head. Without gloves you'd break your hands if you stood there punching at somebody's head. In the old days of bare-knuckle boxing most of the blows were to the body. There were a lot of bruised ribs but hardly anybody died.
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Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, the gloves DO cause brain damage. It's nearly impossible to knock someone our bare handed with a blow to the temple, but easy as hell with gloves. The glove protects the hands, not the face. Notice that in college or olympic boxing they wear protective gear on their heads?
Well, I have professional Muay Thai experience and I'd agree with the gloves causing brain damage. However, as far as the general consensus goes, thats because of the gloves flexing and causing vibrations in your head. As well as that you can get hit a lot in the head, I read that it's better to get a hard blow and get knocked out than lots of small ones. Interestingly, I know a lot of sparring partners who dont like sparring in head-gear because they often feel more dizzy afterwards than without. They attribute this to the gear giving even more padding for the vibrations. When it comes to it being nearly impossible to knock someone out bare-handed I gotta disagree. It's got more to do with where you hit, and how prepared the opponent is. As they say, it's the one you dont see that'll knock you out. Obviously there are several other factors as well. In MMA they wear minimal protection on the hands and people get knocked out just fine.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Boxing gloves cause more damage than they prevent.
Boxing gloves are meant to protect a boxer's hands, not his opponent's head. They do that so well that a modern boxer can keep dishing out hurt long after an early 19th century bare-knuckles boxer would have had both hands incapacitated by his own blows.
Which allows the boxer to do more damage to his opponent, thus increasing the
Re:That's a bit harsh... (Score:5, Informative)
With a direct gunshot to the head the head saves their lives, but with indirect shockwaves (i.e. an IED going off a few meters away) the helmets have been shown to increase the likelihood of a TBI.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. Because they do. The net effect on survivability may be positive, but they still appear to cause specific kinds of brain injuries.
Observing that this is the case and understanding it is the first step to designing helmets that have the same beneficial features as current helemts without while eliminating or mitigating the injury-causing features, thus
War may be dangerous (Score:5, Funny)
You have been warned.
Great Headline. (Score:5, Interesting)
I tought helmets were designed to protect from debri and flying objects caused by explosions, not the shockwave from 2 pounds of C-4 lying around.
Need some of that orange goo (Score:5, Interesting)
from the earlier story...
Stick it in the lining.
Make the helmets more shock resistant (Score:4, Interesting)
There was just an article earlier today (Orange Goo [slashdot.org]) about a material that helps absorb shock, so why not line the inside of the helmets with the stuff?
Re:Make the helmets more shock resistant (Score:4, Informative)
Well, the helmets are designed primarily to be bullet resistant. One of the features it has that makes it bullet resistant is that the helmet doesn't sit on your head, it sits on a web suspension, and the helmet itself surrounds your head by about 1.3cm. That gap helps prevent rounds from penetrating the helmet.
What the study is saying is that the same gap, put there on purpose because it's beneficial against bullets and shrapnel, allows the shockwave blast from an explosion to be more effective against the skull and brain than helmets without the gap.
So now the next generation of helmets will likely try to find a happy balance between the gap, and perhaps some kind of foam solution as the article discusses. It's just more data to further refine designs with for the next generation of this particular technology.
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Similar to Motorcycle Helmets? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember reading a similar article about motorcycle helmets, which said that the incident of brain trauma was higher in helmeted riders versus helmetless. Same reason - the rigid helmet transmitted shockwave straight through the skull to the brain, where the facial structure absorbed a lot of the shock in unhelmeted riders.
So the choice seemed to be pretty and brain damaged, or ugly and smart.
I think they've redesigned the helmets since then.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is completely false. Idiot people who don't want to have to wear a helmet continue to bring that nonsense up. Think about it. How can a helmet which spreads an impact out over a large space *and* absorbs impact via padding be worse than no helmet at all.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Easy, just don't count the people who die from trauma to the head while riding without a helmet.
Re:Similar to Motorcycle Helmets? (Score:4, Informative)
So the choice seemed to be pretty and brain damaged, or ugly and smart.
I think they've redesigned the helmets since then.
I think the choice was more like "pretty, possibly brain-damaged, but ALIVE" and "face ground off by asphalt and DEAD".
I have personally witnessed two motorcycle accidents... In the first one, the guy dumped his bike while making a tight turn at a rain-slicked intersection. His (helmeted) head hit the pavement hard. Probably wouldn't have killed him, but he would definitely not have been getting up to ride after that without a helmet. Second one, the poor bastard hit a deer at about 70mph. Cut the thing right in two, and he slid on the highway for a while. I stopped to help him, and I saw up-close how badly chewed-up his helmet was. Lucky for him he wasn't one of those assholes who rides wearing nothing but shorts and a t-shirt. His gloved hands were a bit bloody, his knee was probably broken, and his helmet had been worn down in one spot so far that I could see the internal layers. But he was alive.
I know you were talking about older bike helmet designs, but I hate to see anything that could give no-helmet idiots more fuel for rationalizing their stupidity and selfishness.
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Yes - it IS flawed (Score:4, Interesting)
shockwaves that make it through the space between a helmet and a soldier's head
Either Jarhead isn't wearing his helmet properly or there IS a major flaw in the design. This kind of thing is mentioned everywhere.
Have you ever worn a bike helmet that was 3 sizes too large? How effective was it? Heres an experiment, place a ball on the ground and smack it with your hand. Notice how much it bounces, moves, etc etc. Now take that ball and hold it 2 feet off the ground. Now hit it, and see how much more it bounces.
If the helmet has an inch of gap, its no surprise that helmets are hitting troops with more effective damage then if they were wearing nothing at all.
I don't know about you. (Score:3, Insightful)
Bavarians (Score:4, Funny)
In the first world war German soldiers found that the spikes on their pointy helmets tended to get caught on things like tree branches, bunker roofs and occasionally each other.
The Bavarians came up with an ingenious solution - put the spike on the inside. As an added bonus it stopped them falling off.
Re:Stop calling it IED (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Stop calling it IED (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll bet there's an army manual somewhere which says so. Probably if the artillery shells are used as artillery shells, they're not considered IEDs, but if they're rigged as a claymore, they are. Sort of like if you somehow hooked a billiard ball to your mouse to make a trackball, you'd have an IPD -- improvised pointing device.
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Re:Stop calling it IED (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, while there is plenty of military doublespeak that could be dispensed with, "IED" I am perfectly happy with. "Improvised" is a worthwhile adjective to use in this context, because the improvised devices do typically have different characteristics from the closest equivalent professionally made devices, so you want to use that or some other adjective (you could use "home made" if you like, but that sounds like you're talking about pie, not weaponry). And since the term covers a range of blast, shrapnel, and incendiary devices, "explosive device" pretty much covers it. For once, it's actually a concise and descriptive acronym.
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Re:Stop calling it IED (Score:4, Funny)
(you could use "home made" if you like, but that sounds like you're talking about pie, not weaponry).
If you're talking about a pie made by me, then there's not a whole lot of difference.
Someday I really should release my autobiographical NIN-parody, Terrible Pie.
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Re:Stop calling it IED (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, there's some very good reasons for calling them IEDs. IED stands for Improvised Explosive Device, of course. What this means is that the explosive device in question is not standard. This matters when it comes to disarming/making them safe.
If a EOD guy comes across an unexploded MK82, he knows precisely how to disarm it - it's standardized. Same deal with most land mines*, claymore devices, unmodified artillery shells**, and the rest of the world's standard military munitions. We even have books on foreign country's stuff, including Russian and old USSR weapons.
Each IED, even if from the same maker, is far more unique, presenting unique challanges when it comes to disarming them.
Oh, and being designated as a land mine doesn't mean a 'large enough' payload, it means it's buried in the ground with an appropriate sensor/detonator to explode when something's over it. Most are pressure sensitive, some anti-vehicle types have magnetic detonators.
Bombs are generally assumed to be dropped out of planes, but then I'm Air Force.
*Though booby-trapping can be an issue with these.
**Many are converted into IEDs via non-conventional detonation systems in Iraq/Afghanistan.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, it's not that the helmet is causing brain damage. It's that the helmet is not protected the soldier from brain damage as well as the older helmet did.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Logic. Specifically, journalistic logic. An accurate title would be boring, so logically you create a title that is more interesting and is also based on words found in the article. Duh.
*sigh* (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA.
Re:Scary (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly it's possible, they just need better shock absorption. The current design transmits too much of the shock to the skull.
This problem is actually caused by the helmet's method of not transmitting shock to the skull. FTA:
So the trick is keeping the overpressure out of the helmet, while keeping it separated from the skull. Perhaps a dual helmet design; Rigid outer shell to absorb and deflect impact, and a second separate inner covering to resist overpressure. Either that, or in place of ACH pads, some type of system relying on fluid dynamics to redirects force forward, out the face of the helmet, rather than inward toward the skull.
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