Lasers that put voices in your head

Via Physorg.com:

A recently unclassified report from the Pentagon from 1998 has revealed an investigation into using laser beams for a few intriguing potential methods of non-lethal torture. Some of the applications the report investigated include putting voices in people's heads, using lasers to trigger uncontrolled neuron firing, and slowly heating the human body to a point of feverish confusion - all from hundreds of meters away.

A US citizen requested access to the document, entitled "Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons," under the Freedom of Information Act a little over a year ago. There is no evidence that any of the technologies mentioned in the 10-year-old report have been developed since the time it was written.

The report explained several types of non-lethal laser applications, including microwave hearing, disrupted neural control, and microwave heating. For the first type, short pulses of RF energy (2450 MHz) can generate a pressure wave in solids and liquids. When exposed to pulsed RF energy, humans experience the immediate sensation of "microwave hearing" - sounds that may include buzzing, ticking, hissing, or knocking that originate within the head.

Studies with guinea pigs and cats suggest that the mechanism responsible for the phenomenon is thermoelastic expansion. Exposure to the RF pulses doesn´t cause any permanent effects, as all effects cease almost immediately after exposure ceases. As the report explains, tuning microwave hearing could enable communicating with individuals from a distance of up to several hundred meters.

"The phenomenon is tunable in that the characteristic sounds and intensities of those sounds depend on the characteristics of the RF energy as delivered," the report explains. "Because the frequency of the sound heard is dependent on the pulse characteristics of the RF energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person´s head. In one experiment, communication of the words from one to ten using ´speech modulated´ microwave energy was successfully demonstrated. Microphones next to the person experiencing the voice could not pick up these sounds. Additional development of this would open up a wide range of possibilities."

The report predicts that communicating at longer distances would be possible with larger equipment, while shorter range signals could be generated with portable equipment. Putting voices in people´s heads could cause what the report calls "psychologically devastating" effects. The technology might even allow for communicating with an individual hostage surrounded by captors, although this would require "extreme directional specificity."

With another weapon, electromagnetic pulses could be used to disrupt the brain´s functioning, although this technology was still in the theoretical stages at the time.

Under normal conditions, all brain structures function with specific rhythmic activity depending on incoming sensory information. Sometimes, the brain synchronizes neuronal activity in order to focus on a specific task, but the degree of neuronal synchronization is highly controlled. However, under certain conditions (such as physical stress or heat stroke), more areas of the brain can fire in a highly synchronized manner, and may begin firing uncontrollably.

The report describes a method for replicating this highly synchronized neuron firing across distances of several hundred meters. High-voltage (100 kV/m) electromagnetic pulses lasting for one nanosecond could trigger neurons to fire, disrupting the body´s controlled firing activity. Short-term effects may include loss of consciousness, muscle spasms, muscle weakness, and seizures lasting for a couple minutes. These high-voltage pulsed sources, which would require an estimated frequency of 15 Hz, exist today.

Another form of non-lethal torture described in the report is microwave heating. By raising the temperature of the body to 41°C (105.8°F), humans can experience sensations such as memory loss and disorientation, and exhibit reduced aggression. According to the report, humans can survive temperatures up to 42°C (107.6°F), at which time prolonged exposure can result in permanent brain damage or death.

The microwave heating technique was tested on a Rhesus monkey, where a 225 MHz beam caused an increase in the animal´s body temperature. Depending on the dosage level, the temperature increase occurred within a time of 15 to 30 minutes. After the beam was removed, the animal´s body temperature decreased back to normal. The report suggests the technique could be useful for controlling crowds or in negotiations.

While the investigations reveal intriguing techniques for non-lethal torture, the report does not mention plans for carrying out specific experiments or studies in the future.

The world's first time machine

From The Daily Mail:

They believe an experiment nuclear scientists plan to carry out in underground tunnels in Geneva in May could create a rift in the fabric of the universe.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) hopes its "atom-smashing" tests - which aim to recreate the conditions in the first billionth of a second after the "Big Bang'" created everything - will shed invaluable light on the origins of the universe.

But Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich, of Moscow's Steklov Mathematical Institute, say the energy produced by forcing tiny particles to collide at close to the speed of light could open the door to visitors from the future.

According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, any large amounts of matter or energy will distort the space and time that surrounds it.

If the energy or mass is large enough, it is claimed that time can be distorted so much that it folds back on itself - creating a wormhole, or time tunnel, between the present and the future.

But Dr Brian Cox, a member of CERN and one of Britain's leading experts in particle physics, is highly sceptical about the Russian claims, calling them "nothing more than a good science fiction story".

He said: "Cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere are far more energetic than anything we can produce.

"They have been occurring for five billion years, and no time travellers have appeared.

"Stephen Hawking has suggested that any future theory of quantum gravity will probably close this possibility off, not least because the universe usually proceeds in a sane way, and time travel into the past isn't sane."

Cynics often point out that if time travel was really possible, we would have been visited by people from the future.

However, Einstein's laws of physics suggest that time travel is only possible into the past as far as the point when the first time machine was invented.

Transplant eyeball sent to pub

From the Courier Mail:

David Killick

January 24, 2008 07:21am

AN EYEBALL sent from Queensland for a transplant operation in Hobart went astray this week - arriving at a pub instead of the hospital.

A hotel guest in the Tasmanian city of Hobart was shocked when he received a foam box on Tuesday night containing a single human eyeball.

The box marked ``Live human organs for transplant'' was delivered by mistake by an unwitting taxi driver.

Hotel worker Gabriel Winner - who requested the name of the hotel not be used - says the agitated guest brought the esky to reception early yesterday morning.

``The guy left with me with a box with an eyeball in it,'' he said.

``He got the box and signed for it and opened it in the middle of the night.

``I thought this is just too weird. I went and put it in the fridge because I didn't know what else to do with it. It was more than a little disconcerting.''

A courier arrived shortly after and took the esky away.

Tracking records for the consignment number on the esky confirmed Australian Air Express picked the package up in Brisbane shortly before 4pm on Tuesday.

The package was dropped at 9.40pm that night. An Australian Air Express spokeswoman confirmed a ``failure in an internal handover process'' which meant the taxi driver was given the wrong package to deliver.

She said the company sincerely regretted the incident.

``As soon as we discovered the error we quickly rectified that and delivered the consignment within the appropriate timeframe,'' she said.

Mr Winner said he was disappointed that someone could have missed out on an operation because of such a basic error.

"It says on the box `human eye tissue for transplant'. What it probably means is the person who was relying on this piece of human tissue has now had to postpone their operation.

``Somebody died to donate these organs to somebody else and they've screwed it up and it's probably not even viable now.''

Queensland Health spokeswoman Penny Geraghty confirmed the incident but said tissue from the eye was recovered and successfully transferred to a patient yesterday morning.

``Nobody missed their operation. The tissue wasn't compromised,'' she said.

She said this was the first time an incident of this type had occurred.

Teen changes blood group, immune system

From the Toronto Star:

Jan 25, 2008 12:42 PM

Reuters

CANBERRA - An Australian teenage girl has become the world's first known transplant patient to change blood groups and take on the immune system of her organ donor, doctors said on Friday, calling her a "one-in-six-billion miracle."

Demi-Lee Brennan, now 15, received a donor liver when she was 9 years old and her own liver failed.

"It's like my second chance at life," Brennan told local media, recounting how her body achieved what doctors said was the holy grail of transplant surgery. "It's kind of hard to believe."

Brennan's body changed blood group from O negative to O positive when she became ill while on drugs to avoid rejection of the organ by her body's immune system.

Her new liver's blood stem cells then invaded her body's bone marrow to take over her entire immune system, meaning the teen no longer needs anti-rejection drugs.

Doctors from Sydney's Westmead Childrens' Hospital said they had no explanation for Brennan's recovery, detailed in the latest edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

"There was no precedent for this having happened at any other time, so we were sort of flying by the seat of our pants," Michael Stormon, a pediatric hepatologist, told local radio.

Stuart Dorney, the hospital's former transplant unit head, said Brennan's treatment could lead to breakthroughs in organ transplant treatment, because normally the immune system of recipients attacked the transplanted tissue.

"We now need to go back over everything that happened to Demi-Lee and see why, and if it can be replicated," said Dorney.

"We think because we used a young person's liver and Demi-Lee had low white blood cells, that could have been a reason," he told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Rejection is normally treated with a combination of drugs, although chronic rejection is irreversible.

Only seven-in-10 transplant operations in Australia are successful after a five-year period due to rejection complications.

Meteorites May Have Fostered Life on Earth

From Wired News:

About 470 million years ago, back when our ancestors were jawless fishes and the land was ruled by insects, Earth was pounded by a series of enormous meteorites. The traces of that hammering still survive today in ancient rocks in southern Sweden and central China, where scientists have found exotic mineral grains found only in meteorites.

By measuring the amount of the grains in the rocks, the scientists calculated the rate of meteorite impacts jumped by a factor of 100 around 470 million years ago. A number of the impacts were big enough to leave 20-mile craters. The energy unleashed was 10 million times greater than the energy in the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

At the same time, scientists have also been putting together a chronology of fossils from the same time, known as the Ordovician Period. They're recording when species first emerged in the fossil record, and when they disappeared as they became extinct. And this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, the scientists report that the impacts coincided with a drastic change in the world's biodiversity.

You might expect mass extinctions. The most famous of all impacts, a ten-mile-wide asteroid that hit the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago, has been linked to mass extinctions that wiped out Tyrannosaurus rex, the other dinosaurs without wings, and about half of all other species on Earth.

But 470 million years ago, that's not what happened. Instead, the diversity of life took a sharp climb right after the meteorites started falling.

Scientists say the discovery is quite unusual. Nature Geoscience's press release declares, "These results are surprising as meteorite impacts are often more commonly associated with mass extinctions."

But actually, aside from the Cretaceous impact, no other case for impact-triggered mass extinctions has strong support today. Earth has regularly been pummeled by meteorites -- mostly small, but in some cases huge. Many of them have had little effect on life, and some may have actually fostered it. The new study of the meteor shower 470 million years ago is important because it's part of a trend, not an exception to the rule.

It may be hard to imagine that a huge rock from space could not have caused mass extinctions. But that idea is actually relatively new. In the late 1970s, Walter and Luis Alvarez, a father and son team of scientists, and their colleagues offered evidence that something very big hit the Earth right around the time the dinosaurs died, at the end of the Cretaceous Period. They claimed the impact was the kill mechanism. They were greeted with scoffs, but over the next couple decades other scientists found a wealth of supporting evidence, from shocked bits of quartz to the outline of the crater itself buried in Mexico.

The asteroid appears to have caused massive tidal waves and splashed molten rock far and wide, triggering gigantic forest fires. The soot from the fires blackened the sky, which was also loaded with other nasty compounds from the impact that may have caused a global blackout for months, acid rain, and severe global warming. These days, most scientists who study the impact don't think it's a coincidence that this environmental catastrophe came right around the time that 50 percent of the world's species became extinct. If not the sole killer, the impact was at the very least an accessory to the crime.

As years went by, the Cretaceous impact went from shocking hypothesis to icon. Who can count all the paintings that have been made of the crash -- often from a doomed dinosaur's perspective? The impact hypothesis had a big effect on scientists, too. It became a prime example of evolution's contingency, how its path can turn suddenly due to an abrupt change in the environment.

Some scientists began to argue that other impacts may have triggered other extinctions. They offered evidence of a rise in extinctions every 26 million years. They suggested that a star in our neighborhood periodically disturbed the cloud of comets surrounding our solar system, sending some towards our defenseless planet. Other researchers looked at big pulses of extinctions, such as the one at the end of the Permian Period, 250 million years ago, when over 90 percent of species disappeared. A few claimed to find traces of impacts that coincided with those major die-offs as well.

But these theories have lost a lot of their luster. The cycles of extinctions have blurred since scientists have learned how to make more precise estimates of the ages of rocks. It turns out some of the impacts linked to mass extinctions actually hit millions of years before or after the die-offs.

Meanwhile, geochemists and paleontologists are finding evidence that points to other culprits for the mass extinctions. Global warming appears to be behind many of the biggest. Volcanoes can unleash vast amounts of carbon dioxide, and heat-trapping methane can rise up from the sea floor. There's some evidence that these past episodes of global warming triggered a chain reaction of destruction, from the acidification of the oceans to the destruction of the ozone layer. It looks as if our planet can wreak its own destruction without the help of asteroids (or even people).

At the same time, impacts have proven surprisingly impotent. In one study, John Alroy of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, for example, surveyed all the impacts that occurred in the past 65 million years -- including some that left craters 50 miles wide or more. He then compared them to the well-documented fossil record of mammals in North America. He found no link whatsoever between impacts and changes in the extinction rate.

So how could an asteroid cause so much damage at the end of the Cretaceous, and so little at other times? It's always possible that there are extinction-triggering impacts yet to discover. It's also possible that impacts do cause extinctions, but not a lot. Earlier this year, for example, a team of scientists announced that a meteorite may have exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, killing off mastodons and other big mammals of the New World. But that's small potatoes compared to the major die-offs in Earth's history.

It's also possible that the impact at the end of the Cretaceous was a major fluke. It was unusually big, for one thing, forming the third biggest known crater on Earth. Its effects may have also been amplified because of where it hit the planet. Instead of plunging into the deep ocean, it smashed into a shallow shelf of calcium carbonate and other minerals. It lofted this deadly cocktail into the atmosphere, unleashing hell on life below. Smaller impacts that hit other places may not have been able to similarly break Earth's food network.

But how could meteorites drive up the diversity of life? The researchers aren't sure, but they suggest that the impacts may have disturbed old ecosystems, creating a new space in which new species could evolve. They're not the first scientists to argue that meteorites can be beneficial in the long term. A large impact can rework the ocean floor or a shoreline, or even scoop out a new lake. In these new habitats, new species can evolve.

It's particularly intriguing to compare the number of species in crater lakes to other lakes of the same size. Crater lakes are often much more diverse. It's possible the asteroids or comets that scoop out the craters also fertilize them with minerals and other nutrients, supporting more species.

This fertilization from space may have made life itself possible on Earth. Four billion years ago, comets and asteroids delivered water, organic molecules, and other raw materials necessary for life. Some of the early craters may have even served as natural beakers that synthesized new chemicals essential for life. Not every impact was so benign on the early Earth; judging from the craters still preserved on the moon, the biggest ones may have boiled off the oceans. But some researchers have also speculated that microbes could have been lofted into space, where they could have survived on meteorites, or perhaps on other planets, before reseeding Earth.

This new view of impacts doesn't mean that we shouldn't be worried about the asteroids that may cross our path in years to come. But what's bad for human civilization may not be so bad for life as a whole.

Pork workers suffer neurological symptoms from inhaled misty pig brains

From Wired News:

Minn. Slaughterhouse Workers Fall Ill

By MARTIGA LOHN
Associated Press Writer

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- On the slaughterhouse floor at Quality Pork Processors Inc. is an area known as the "head table," but not because it is the place of honor. It is where workers cut up pigs' heads and then shoot compressed air into the skulls until the brains come spilling out.

But now the grisly practice has come under suspicion from health authorities.

Over eight months from last December through July, 11 workers at the plant in Austin, Minn. - all of them employed at the head table - developed numbness, tingling or other neurological symptoms, and some scientists suspect inhaled airborne brain matter may have somehow triggered the illnesses.

The use of compressed air to remove pig brains was suspended at Quality Pork earlier this week while authorities try to get to the bottom of the mystery.

"I'm still in shock, I guess," said 37-year-old Susan Kruse, who worked at the plant for 15 years until she got too weak to do her job last February. "But it was very surprising to hear that there was that many other people that have gotten this."

Five of the workers - including Kruse, who has been told she may never work again - have been diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, or CIDP, a rare immune disorder that attacks the nerves and produces tingling, numbness and weakness in the arms and legs, sometimes causing lasting damage.

New cases of CIDP occur at the rate of one or two per 100,000 people each year, according to Dr. P. James B. Dyck of the Mayo Clinic.

State health officials said there is no evidence the public is at risk - either from those afflicted or from any food leaving the plant, which supplies Hormel Foods Inc.

The working theory from two Mayo Clinic neurologists treating the workers: Exposure to pig brain tissue scattered by the compressed air triggered the illnesses.

"As we've investigated these patients, we have information that suggests very strongly that the immune system is activated very strongly in a very compelling way," said Dr. Daniel Lachance.

Compressed air could turn some brain matter into a mist that could be inhaled by workers, said Mike Doyle, a microbiologist who heads the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety. Or the workers may have come into contact with something dangerous and then touched their noses or mouths, he said.

Scientists have yet to figure out if there is something in the brain matter that could be causing the symptoms.

"The hard part will be identifying the causative agent and associating that with the animal, showing that the animal carries it," Doyle said.

Minnesota Health Department spokesman Doug Schultz said the agency is looking into the theory but has not ruled out other causes. Kruse said the company has harvested pork brains on and off for years, depending on demand, but it's not known why workers began getting sick recently.

Quality Pork has not said what it does with the pork brains. Sold fresh and in cans, pork brains are fried and eaten in sandwiches or gravy in some parts of the country. But it is a small market, and the American Meat Institute, which represents most of the nation's pork processors, does not even track sales.

Exactly how many of the plant's 1,300 employees worked at the head table is unclear; Quality Pork's chief executive did not return calls. Kruse said there were 11 workers at the head table on any given shift, but the lineup changed because of turnover or because people were assigned other jobs.

In a rapid-fire process that is noisy, smelly and bloody, severed pigs' heads are cut up at the head table at a rate of more than 1,100 an hour. Workers slice off the cheek and snout meat, then insert a nozzle in the head and blast air inside until the light pink mush that is the brain tissue squirts out from the base of the skull.

Kruse, whose job was to remove meat from the back of the animals' heads, said she doesn't recall any spray or mist from the de-braining. The head-table workers were protected by safety glasses, helmets, gloves and belly guards, but none wore anything over their mouths or noses, she said.

Head-table workers are now required to wear plastic face shields and protective plastic or rubber sleeves, the Health Department said.

The use of compressed air to remove hog brains is relatively uncommon, according to industry officials. That's because many plants don't even remove them. And some of the processors that do extract brains simply split the hogs' skulls open.

Some of the biggest pork processors - Tyson Foods Inc., JBS Swift & Co. and Cargill Inc. - said they don't handle brains because the market isn't big enough. No pork workers at Tyson, Cargill or JBS Swift have reported symptoms similar to those of the Quality Pork employees, the companies said.

CIDP attacks the lining around the nerves, slowing or blocking the brain's signals to the muscles. But exactly what triggers the attack is unknown.

Victims can recover fairly quickly if the illness is caught early, said Dr. Kenneth Gorson, a neurologist at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston.

In advanced cases, treatment arrests the disease but doesn't reverse its effects, he said. Treatment involves infusions of immune globulin or a plasma-exchange technique that removes antibodies from the patient's blood. Another option is a steroid called prednisone.

American Meat Institute spokeswoman Janet Riley said: "We are watching the situation very closely and we've offered any help that the state health department would need. But certainly if facts came to light that justified the change in practices, you could imagine protecting the workers is critical."

Workers are worried, said Richard Morgan, who heads the union local at Quality Pork.

"The process has stopped, where they assume it was at," he said. "It could have been from something different. Nobody knows at this time. We can talk about gray matter till we're blue in the face."

Gigantic! Prehistoric!! Scorpions!!!

Via Wired News:

Nov 21, 7:54 AM EST

Scientists Find Fossil of Enormous Bug

By THOMAS WAGNER
Associated Press Writer

LONDON (AP) -- This was a bug you couldn't swat and definitely couldn't step on. British scientists have stumbled across a fossilized claw, part of an ancient sea scorpion, that is of such large proportion it would make the entire creature the biggest bug ever.

How big? Bigger than you, and at 8 feet long as big as some Smart cars.

The discovery in 390-million-year-old rocks suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were far larger in the past than previously thought, said Simon Braddy, a University of Bristol paleontologist and one of the study's three authors.

"This is an amazing discovery," he said Tuesday.

"We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies. But we never realized until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were," he said.

The research found a type of sea scorpion that was almost half a yard longer than previous estimates and the largest one ever to have evolved.

The study, published online Tuesday in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, means that before this sea scorpion became extinct it was much longer than today's average man is tall.

Prof. Jeorg W. Schneider, a paleontologist at Freiberg Mining Academy in southeastern Germany, said the study provides valuable new information about "the last of the giant scorpions."

Schneider, who was not involved in the study, said these scorpions "were dominant for millions of years because they didn't have natural enemies. Eventually they were wiped out by large fish with jaws and teeth."

Braddy's partner paleontologist Markus Poschmann found the claw fossil several years ago in a quarry near Prum, Germany, that probably had once been an ancient estuary or swamp.

"I was loosening pieces of rock with a hammer and chisel when I suddenly realized there was a dark patch of organic matter on a freshly removed slab. After some cleaning I could identify this as a small part of a large claw," said Poschmann, another author of the study.

"Although I did not know if it was more complete or not, I decided to try and get it out. The pieces had to be cleaned separately, dried, and then glued back together. It was then put into a white plaster jacket to stabilize it," he said.

Eurypterids, or ancient sea scorpions, are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of today's scorpions and possibly all arachnids, a class of joint-legged, invertebrate animals, including spiders, scorpions, mites and ticks.

Braddy said the fossil was from a Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae, a kind of scorpion that lived only in Germany for about 10 million years, about 400 million years ago.

He said some geologists believe that gigantic sea scorpions evolved due to higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere in the past. Others suspect they evolved in an "arms race" alongside their likely prey, fish that had armor on their outer bodies.

Braddy said the sea scorpions also were cannibals that fought and ate one other, so it helped to be as big as they could be.

"The competition between this scorpion and its prey was probably like a nuclear standoff, an effort to have the biggest weapon," he said. "Hundreds of millions of years ago, these sea scorpions had the upper hand over vertebrates - backboned animals like ourselves."

That competition ended long ago.

But the next time you swat a fly, or squish a spider at home, Braddy said, try to "think about the insects that lived long ago. You wouldn't want to swat one of those."

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On the Net: http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk