Traumatic brain injury has become the signature war wound for soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan--and new research suggests that soldiers may not be adequately protected against the explosions that cause these injuries. By modeling how blast waves propagate through a soldier's head, an MIT research group found that current combat helmets don't offer much protection, because the blast waves from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) can enter the skull through the face.
"There's a passageway through those soft tissues directly into the brain tissue, without having to go through bone or anything hard," said Raul Radovitzky, an aeronautical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [LiveScience]
, which was published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers created their own computer model based on a real person's brain scans; what they found actually contradicted findings from earlier, rougher models. A previous study
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