'Grunt' tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries -- panic, exhaustion, heat, noise -- and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed...

"Describes various top-secret projects, including the Manhattan Project, Nazi experimentation, and several others"--

Inspector Pekkala returns to find himself enlisted by Stalin to investigate the death of one of the Soviet Union's top military engineers. However, finding the truth in the Soviet Union is never easy.

For more than forty years, the U.S. government has researched extrasensory perception, using it in attempts to locate hostages, fugitives, secret bases, and downed fighter jets; to divine other nations' secrets; and even to predict future threats to national security. The intelligence agencies and military services involved include the CIA, DIA, NSA, DEA, the Navy, Air Force, and Army--and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, for the first time, Jacobsen...

Dave Riley and his Green Beret A-Team must defeat a threat shockingly inhuman. Set in the shadowy world of genetic research, Synbat, stands for Synthetic Battle Form. Riley is called up for 'damage control' at a lab in the deep woods of western Tennessee. The research conducted there, under the Pentagon's secret Black Budget, is Top Secret. Until the subjects of the experiment escape. The Synbats are now roaming the countryside, acting out what

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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and writer-researcher Avis Lang examine how the methods and tools of astrophysics have been enlisted in the service of war. "The overlap is strong, and the knowledge flows in both directions," say the authors, because astrophysicists and military planners care about many of the same things: multi-spectral detection, ranging, tracking, imaging, high ground, nuclear fusion, and access to space. Tyson and Lang call...

"Starting in the early 1960s, there was fear in America about the proliferation of computer database and networking technologies. People worried that these systems were going to be used by both corporations and governments for surveillance and control. Indeed, the dominant cultural view at the time was that computers were tools of repression, not liberation -- and that included the ARPANET, the military research network that would grow into the Internet...

"In the chaos following WWII, some of the greatest spoils of Germany's resources were the Third Reich's scientific minds. The U.S. government secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis' knowledge outweighed their crimes and began a covert operation code-named Paperclip to allow them to work in the U.S. without the public's full knowledge. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators,...