'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...

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...

Since its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has grown to become the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful, and most controversial military science research and development agency. Created by President Eisenhower to prevent another Sputnik, and to focus primarily on defensive programs against nuclear weapons, the agency--and its imagination and scope--has expanded enormously with each passing year....