14 DAY TRIAL // As morbid and gross as it may sound, many of the advances in medicine are owed to people who have donated their bodies to the cause of scientific research. Oftentimes, medicine undergrad students attend lessons performed on stored human bodies.
The US Army has a particular interest in such things, because it needs to always know how a new piece of equipment or weaponry may affect its soldiers, both in the field and at home.
Explosions are the worst offenders when it comes to things that claim the lives of military personnel. And it doesn't even have to be because of the shrapnel.
For example, when a charge of C4 or TNT detonates, anyone nearby is in huge danger of dying because of the resulting wind blast alone.
The rapid air pressure change can produce shock waves strong enough to slam through a helmet and the skull beneath, causing brain damage and even death.
Donor skulls have been used in the past – and are still used in the present – to study effects of various forms of trauma and how helmets may mitigate it.
Now, 3D printed skulls might take over, allowing the U.S. Army to look further into things, and faster. The US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is already creating such skulls to study how those shock waves we mentioned before affect them.
Their goal is to discover ways to improve helmet pads and shells and maybe increase the effectiveness of other military gear that may be worn on the head.
The skulls may not be made of bone, exactly, but they do behave like the actual things, the skulls belonging to 20-39 year-old soldiers. Apparently, the Army has come up with a synthetic bone capturing material.
A CT scan of a real skull is used to build the model, then the material is fed to a 3D printer that creates the skull itself, with similar density in each part of the skull and mirroring all other details.
The ARL team is fairly confident in the accuracy of the tests that the resulting skulls can be put through, as they tested their synthetic bone material against the real thing earlier in the year. It may not be a perfect match, but it is a “close match,” according to the fractures that resulted from hitting both synthetic and natural bone at high velocity.
Alas, we can't say for sure how much time will pass before this new “research” leads to any great discoveries.
