All militaries try to develop a “winning edge” in warfare. More often than not these attempts focus on new weapons systems and weapons platforms, on new ways of maximizing the offensive capabilities of a military through firepower. These attempts can also involve the training and development of soldiers, including performance enhancements to make them fight better, longer, and smarter than the enemy and to counter human frailty on the battlefield. These concerns and problems have long held the interest of the U.S. military. This article traces the development, rationale, and legacy of one such attempt to deal with human frailty and the “body problem,” a kind of military futurism devised at the peak of the Cold War. Dr. Marion Sulzberger envisioned creating soldiers who had their own kind of special “biological armor,” or what he termed “idiophylaxis.” In 1962, he presented a paper at the Army Science Conference at West Point titled “Progress and Prospects in Idiophylaxis (Built-In Individual Self-Protection of the Combat Soldier).” Sulzberger's call was for a radical rethinking of the combat soldier and the ways in which soldiers were imagined, designed, and developed. His goal was to “armor” the individual soldier both internally and psychologically through new forms of biomedicine and biotechnology. The interventions he detailed in 1962 live on today in the U.S. military's soldier performance enhancement research programs, including DARPA's recent “Inner Armor” program and desire to make “kill-proof” soldiers.

This study aims at improving the performance of a centrifugal pump by using different angular diffusers on the downstream side of the centrifugal pump impeller. Numerical and experimental studies have been carried out on different vaned and non-vaned diffuser with three different wall divergence angle (α) of 0°, 5° and 10° to achieve that purpose. The data analyses show good agreement between the numerical and experimental results. They reveal profound effect of the divergence angle (α) of angular vaned diffuser on the head and overall efficiency of centrifugal pumps especially at high flow rates as they broaden operating region of the centrifugal pump. In fact it is found that the head and overall efficiency of impeller with vaned diffuser α = 10° enhance by 15.4 and 9 percent respectively compared to that of centrifugal pump with no vaned diffuser at high flow rates. Furthermore the head and overall efficiency of impeller with vaned diffuser α = 10° increase by 5.7 and 7 percent respectively in comparison with the impeller with vaned diffuser α = 0°.

A neuroadaptive control scheme for elastic-joint robots is proposed that uses a relatively small neural network. Stability is achieved through standard Lyapunov techniques. For added performance, robust modifications are made to both the control law and the weight update law to compensate for only approximate learning of the dynamics. The estimate of the modeling error used in the robust terms is taken directly from the error of the network in modeling the dynamics at the currant state. The neural network used is the CMAC-RBF Associative Memory (CRAM), which is a modification of Albus's CMAC network and can be used for robots with elastic degrees of freedom. This results in a scheme that is computationally practical and results in good performance.

A number of reviews and meta-analyses in the past 30 years have described and evaluated interventions designed to enhance ocademic performance in university undergraduates. Reviewers’recommendations, however, have often remained unimplemented. This meta-review of reviews and meta-analyses of interventions published in the academic literature between 1969 and 1999 was aimed to determine which kinds of interventions have been successful in enhancing academic performance, to identify methodological shortcomings, and to suggest directions for future research and teaching practice. It was found that interventions are often successful at enhancing performance, with the recent trend towards cognitive-behavioural or metacognitive interventions showing most promise. However, there are widespread methodological shortcomings in the reviewed literature. Key recommendations for future research include random allocotion to treatment and control groups, the use of volunteer populations, exclusion of first semester students as research participants, use of nonanalogue outcome measures, and reporting of effect sizes rather than reliance solely on statistical significance as the index of success. A teaching style that fosters the use of metacognitive and self-directed learning strategies may further enhance contemporary teaching practice.