August 15, 2008— The first time Army Specialist Frederick Hussey “got blown up in Iraq,” as he says, was on Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006. Hussey was five months into his yearlong deployment as an infantry medic when a cluster of anti-tank explosives jolted his Humvee off the road some 50 miles south of Baghdad. The blast filled the cabin with acrid black smoke, but Hussey was able to jerk the wheel back and steer the truck to safety. “Everybody ended up being OK with that one,” Hussey says. “You know—shook up and all, but there was no loss of life.

As the actual ground combat between Russia and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia grinds to a halt, security and Web experts have begun to focus on what might have been a secret third front in the conflict: the Internet. With numerous Georgian government Web sites defaced or shut down, the virtual attacks that preceded the actual invasion may go down in history as the first war in cyberspace.

Atom bombs are just the beginning. In the last half-century, the greatest military minds on Earth have developed an arsenal of weapons to make mutually assured destruction seem tame.

Whether these masterpieces of destruction come from miles above Earth or millimeters below the skin, they have one thing in common: they're spooky as hell.

Hear more about author James Vlahos's experience in the Army's new smell simulator on the PopSci Podcast.

Launch the slideshow to learn how the seafood bandage works.

When it comes to war wounds, red is dead. Stop the bleeding, and you save the soldier. It´s a simple idea that´s driving a budding industry for fast-acting blood-clotting agents.

For years, the U.S. military has wanted a plane that could loiter just outside enemy territory for more than a dozen hours and, on command, hurtle toward a target faster than the speed of sound. And then level it. But aircraft that excel at subsonic flight are inefficient at Mach speeds, and vice versa. The answer is Switchblade, an unmanned, shape-changing plane concept under development by Northrop Grumman.

Click "Slideshow" to the left for PopSci's Iraq tech report card

The mission changes for Charlie Company seconds after the soldiers roll off the base. The dreary night patrol around Balad, a shambling Shi´ite town in north-central Iraq, has just been canceled. It´s time instead to hightail it west, to the Sunni neighborhood of Ad Duluiyah. â€Alpha Company is taking direct fire,†a voice crackles over the radio in First Lt. Brian Feldmayer´s Humvee. â€I need you to expedite."

In a heated wartime editorial, PopSci rebutted highly publicized claims that U.S. planes were inferior in speed, range and armament to enemy fighters—claims made by Major Alexander de Seversky, a WWI Russian pilot turned U.S. aircraft manufacturer. “It would be an insult to the dictionary to designate as ’military’ craft so deficient in the basic qualities necessary for combat,” he wrote in his 1942 book Victory through Air Power. We argued that each plane in the U.S.