Crystals: New Tool for Spotting Brain Blasts

It's tough to tell when an explosion has rattled a soldier's brain; even MRI scans don't always uncover the damage. But "a color-changing crystal device worn on a soldier’s uniform could reveal the intensity of [those] bomb blasts," *New Scientist *reports.

The crystal’s color is determined by its structure, so when a shock wave from a blast hits the crystal, changing the structure, its color will change too... “Based on that information we can extract how much force the soldier has received," Shu Yang, one of the researchers who developed the device, says.

Yang's research is backed by the Office of Naval Research. Other military agencies are working on their own answers to mapping the injuries. Darpa recently gave Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center a $2 million contract to develop a flexible tape packed with "multiple sensors to collect and record data associated with blasts, including shock waves, acceleration, acoustic levels, and light intensities." The Army has already outfitted 1,145 soldiers' helmets with lower-tech blast monitors.

Shu Yang's next step: "develop a method to quantify the [crystal] color changes and translate this into a measure of neurological damage."

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[Photo: Blackfive]

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