“Preliminary findings suggest a link between Morgellons Disease and Agrobacterium, a soil bacterium extensively manipulated and used in making GM crops; has genetic engineering created a new epidemic?”

Vitaly Citovsky is a professor of molecular and cell biology at Stony Brook University in New York (SUNY). He is a world authority on the genetic modification of cells by Agrobacterium, a soil bacterium causing crown gall disease in plants, that has been widely used in creating genetically modified (GM) plants since the 1980s because of its ability to transfer a piece of its genetic material, the T-DNA on its tumour-inducing (Ti) plasmid to the plant genome ….

Citovsky’s team took scanning electron microscope pictures of the fibres in or extruding from the skin of patients suffering from Morgellons disease, confirming that they are unlike any ordinary natural or synthetic fibres.

They also analysed patients for Agrobacterium DNA. Skin biopsy samples from Morgellons patients were subjected to high-stringency polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for genes encoded by the Agrobacterium chromosome and also for Agrobacterium virulence (vir) genes and T-DNA on its Ti plasmid. They found that “all Morgellons patients screened to date have tested positive for the presence of Agrobacterium, whereas this microorganism has not been detected in any of the samples derived from the control, healthy individuals.” Their preliminary conclusion is that “Agrobacterium may be involved in the etiology and/or progression” of Morgellons Disease.

… Agrobacterium not only infects human and other animal cells, it also transfers genes into them. It was SUNY professor Citovsky and his team that made the discovery some years ago. Until then, the genetic engineering community had assumed that Agrobacterium did not infect animal cells, and certainly would not transfer genes into them.

Agrobacterium was found to transfer T-DNA into the chromosomes of human cells.

… Since the discovery in the 1970s that Agrobacterium can transfer genes into plants causing crown gall disease, the soil bacterium has been developed into a vector for inserting desirable genes into the plant genome to create transgenic (GM) plants.

… By the late 1990s, the Agrobacterium vector system became very widely used, and many GM crops created were commercially released.

… Transgenic plants with contaminating Agrobacterium “have a ready route for horizontal gene escape, via Agrobacterium, helped by the ordinary conjugative mechanisms of many other bacteria that cause diseases, which are present in the environment.” In the process, new and exotic disease agents could be created.

- Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Joe Cummins @ GlobalResearch.ca: Link.

See Also

Morgellons @ Wikipedia

Morgellons Watch: “Resources for Morgellons investigators. Skeptical analysis and discussion.”

I was shocked by this public service announcement — a thirty second plea for workplace safety, culminating in the narrator’s horrific workplace accident.

I don’t even work in a kitchen, but this PSA makes me want to be more careful all the time, everywhere.

Link @ You Tube.

prevent-it.ca @ Workplace Safety & Insurance Board, Ontario Canada

“I wondered if he saw me for what I feared I had become — a drug rep with an M.D. I began to think that the money was affecting my critical judgement.”
- Dr. Daniel Carlat

How many doctors speak for drug companies? We don’t know for sure, but one recent study indicates that at least 25 percent of all doctors in the United States receive drug money for lecturing to physicians or for helping to market drugs in other ways. This meant that I was about to join some 200,000 American physicians who are being paid by companies to promote their drugs.

… I found myself astonished at the level of detail that drug companies were able to acquire about doctors’ prescribing habits. I asked my reps about it; they told me that they received printouts tracking local doctors’ prescriptions every week. The process is called “prescription data-mining,” in which specialized pharmacy-information companies (like IMS Health and Verispan) buy prescription data from local pharmacies, repackage it, then sell it to pharmaceutical companies. This information is then passed on to the drug reps, who use it to tailor their drug-detailing strategies.

- Dr. Daniel Carlat @ The New York Times: link.

“After the cows were done in one pasture, the chicken cages were rolled in. “

I read recently about an experiment in permaculture, which is the science of making food production ecologically sustainable. The Chinese have been making an art of it for thousands of years, with complicated interlocking cultivation systems, where the waste from one part is always recycled in some other part.

In this system, chickens were kept in small flocks in 20×20 foot covered cages. The cages were on wheels. Small herds of cows were also kept, in constant rotation among many small pastures. After the cows were done in one pasture, the chicken cages were rolled in. The chickens broke the cow patties apart looking for bugs, which were plentiful. This allowed the cow manure to break down faster, resulting in quicker regrowth of the grass, as well as lower rates of disease among the cows. The chickens were healthier as well, and got to run about and hunt for bugs, which if I were a chicken, I would vastly prefer to living in some overcrowded factory. Overall, the production of both beef and chicken increased dramatically over other organic ranching methods, putting it on a par with non-organic methods.

The inventor of the system based the idea off of the fact that in nature, herds of wild ungulates are always followed by flocks of birds. Pretty clever, eh? Another thing: you don’t need a robot chicken catcher, you just wheel the cage up to the slaughterhouse and pull the chickens in with a net.

- spun @ SlashDot: Link.

Comments from SlashDot readers

Uh, your forgetting the other benefit the chinese animal husbandry has brought to our world: a fresh stream of animal hosted viruses (note to the pedantic: virii, as a word, sucks balls) to infect our biped bodies and boost our immune systems. If we don’t choke on our own mucus first.

For the genuine do-it-yourselfer: How To Cut Your Own Hair

4. Simple styles are best for home hair cuts. The easiest cut will be one length everywhere. Decide on an overall length (it’s a good idea to measure your hair when you have a cut that you find especially flattering) and then grab your ruler. Working in small sections, comb your hair straight out from your scalp and hold a section smoothly between your index and middle fingers. Measure to the desired length and carefully snip off the excess. Continue in this manner until you have cut all of your hair. This method works equally well for both men and women. The length of the chosen cut can vary from quite short to shoulder length and beyond.

- Elizabeth Grace @ HowToDoThings.com: Link.

Be a better person, avoid Alzheimer’s?

People who lead a good clean life — those who are conscientious, self-disciplined and scrupulous — appear to be less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

The finding is the latest from a long-running study of nearly 1,000 Catholic nuns, priests and brothers by Robert Wilson of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. The study appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Wilson and colleagues defined conscientiousness in the study as people who control their impulses and are goal-directed. These people are often considered dependable.

- Reuters: Link.

Via Futurismic.

“In an online game called World of Warcraft, an unexpected error in the software has provided a ready-made laboratory for studying the effects of an epidemic.”

The discovery, revealed in next month’s issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, has been hailed as a significant step forward in understanding how a deadly virus could break out.

… In September 2005 what was intended as a minor hindrance for a small group of characters spiralled beyond the control of program-makers into a full-blown epidemic.

A new villain, a winged serpent called Hakkar, originally designed as a challenge for only the strongest characters, started transmitting its “corrupted blood” virus down the ranks until it affected almost every area and every player in the game.

[S]cientists were able to monitor how quickly the disease spread and where to, while assessing the players’ individual responses to the outbreak. The particular features of the game, such as the many hours players around the world dedicate to it and the emotional investment they put into their online alter egos, offer scientists a tantalisingly close match to real social conditions.

As the virus spread, very real challenges emerged, such as the failure of quarantine measures, further transmission by character’s pets and the existence of “immune” characters, who act as carriers, passing the virus to others while failing to succumb to symptoms.

[Times Online: Link]

Epidemiology @ Wikipedia

World of Warcraft @ Wikipedia.

Article @ BBC

Abstract @ Lancet (free registration required)

Post @ Boing Boing.

“A ubiquitous chemical in common plastic may play a role in the obesity epidemic. The chemical industry is unamused.”

There appears to be evidence that the damage done by bisphenol A during embryonic development may be scrambling the signals that fat cells normally receive during prenatal and neonatal development. After the initial distortion, the affected fat cells never work properly again. Affected animals are unable to properly metabolize their normal diets, leading to obesity. And guess what? The introduction of bisphenol A into the human environment in significant quantities tracks pretty closely, in timing, to the advent of the so-called obesity epidemic in the United States.

[Andrew Leonard: Salon]

Re-thinking the war on micro-organisms

Antibiotics underpin all of modern medicine. Alarmingly, we are nearing the end of the antibiotic era. Bacteria and viruses are evolving faster than scientific innovation. Trivial infections we hardly think about now will once again become fatal.

The Race [Michael Burton] proposes that we must now join the race to evolve with them. It also presents a mirror to ourselves to question personal and societal lifestyle practices and our self-perceived superiority over other organisms. Who do we think we are?

A first project is concerned with maggots which have been used throughout medical history as a painless way of treating wounds because they remove dead and infected tissue, while leaving healthy tissue intact. But they fell into disuse when antibiotics were first introduced in the 1940s.

Medics now recognise that maggots have advantages over more recent forms of treatment, as they kill the bacteria that cause infection, including the so-called antibiotic-resistant superbugs. There is also some evidence that maggots also stimulate the wound to heal. Their re-introduction in hospitals could therefore enable NHS to save millions.

Maggot Cohabitation encourages us to invest in the symbiotic relationship pre and post treatments. You are encouraged to keep at home special portable receptacles that would allow you to follow the life cycle. The maggots would be delivered as larvae to your home and you carry them to the hospital. At the end of the treatment, you’d release them as flies, and they would take your genetic material with them as they fly away which is much more poetic than the current practice which consists of incinerating the maggots once they have finished their healing job.

[we make money not art]

See Also

Maggot calculator for wound size

ZooBiotic Ltd (medical sterile maggots)

In their recent email, the Organic Consumers Association reports:

Creekstone Farms has won one of the most bizarre court cases the USDA has brought upon itself in recent years.

Early last year, after the discovery of another case of Mad Cow Disease in the U.S., foreign markets tightened their ban on U.S. beef based on the fact that the USDA requires such a small percentage of meat to be tested for this fatal disease. In an attempt to maintain sales with customers overseas, Kansas-based Creekstone Farms announced it would voluntarily test all of its meat for Mad Cow Disease.

Surprisingly, the USDA responded to Creekstone, saying it was illegal for them to have such high quality food safety testing. This action left Creekstone and its lawyers scratching their heads trying to figure out where in the law books it states that it’s illegal to test food for safety beyond what is required by law. Creekstone took the USDA to court and last week a federal judge ruled against the USDA. The results of the case will likely create a domino effect in the industry where more meatpackers will voluntarily choose to increase testing for Mad Cow Disease in order to allure international and domestic customers.

[Organic Consumers Association]

Google: Creekstone Farms

Thought for today …:

Ars longa, vita brevis is part of an aphorism by Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, usually truncated to its first two statements, art is long, life is short. (See also List of Latin phrases.)

The full text in Latin is:

Ars longa,
vita brevis,
occasio praeceps,
experimentum periculosum,
iudicium difficile.

The full text is often rendered in English as:

“Life is short, [the] art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.”

Also:

“Life is short, art [of medicine] is long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decisions difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.”

(from Aphorism, section I, no. 1)

[Wikipedia]

Using PS3 idle time to research protein folding diseases

The Folding@home (FAH) initiative, a joint project spearheaded by Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) and Stanford University Associate Professor of Chemistry Vijay Pande, will enable PlayStation 3 consoles to assist in medical research …. Pande’s team will use a chain of networked PS3s to seek out information related to protein folding.

In researching the causes behind Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and various types of cancer, some top scientists have narrowed their research down to the process of protein folding. Misfolds are related to diseases such as the latter, and since protein folding takes place in roughly 10 one-millionths of a second, it takes complex computer simulations to attempt to study the process.

…. The power of the PS3’s Cell processor is significantly faster than the PCs that scientists use. As a result, a network of some 10,000 PS3s can handle a workload that would take nearly 200,000 PCs in other circumstances. What normally takes from five years to a decade for research could be slashed down to a few months. How does it work? Just like other @home programs, FAH uses idle PS3 consoles that are connected to the Internet to simulate and process a protein strand. Stanford uploads one to a PS3, which it begins to work upon. After the strand has been processed, the data goes back to Stanford’s servers. Eventually, with enough systems breaking down data, a scientist can analyze all of the findings at a significantly faster pace than with PCs.

…. For those interested in seeing the process at work, FAH runs a highly detailed visual simulation of a protein strand. The PS3 is able to render strands in several different ways … gamers can zoom in, out, and around each molecule of the protein. In addition, a map of the world can be seen behind the protein strain. Yellow illumination on the map indicates which geographic regions have the most gamers volunteering their PS3’s processing power to aide the project.

[Sterling McGarvey: GameSpy | March 15, 2007 ]

Various molecules, including LSD, can bind with serotonin receptors.

Recent research indicates that the serotonin 2A receptor is like “a lock into which both hallucinogenic and nonhallucinogenic keys fit. While LSD may turn this lock to the right, kicking off one set of responses, lisuride turns the tumbler to the left, an action that only causes a subset of those responses.”

Since the 1980s researchers in this field have agreed that LSD, which was first synthesized by Swiss scientists in 1938, likely affects serotonin 2A receptors in the brain (serotonin is a neurotransmitter suspected to play a role in the communication of mood and consciousness). These receptors show up in many places in the brain, including several areas in the cortex (known for sensory perception), and the thalamus (an interior region known for relaying messages to the cortex as well as regulating arousal and awareness).

The current research was performed by creating a mouse model that enabled scientists to observe behavioral and cell-signaling responses to hallucinogenic drugs by comparing them with those triggered by lisuride, an anti-Parkinson’s disease drug chemically similar to LSD that does not have hallucinogenic effects. After determining that mice given psychedelic drugs consistently experience head twitching, the team bred mice with the serotonin 2A receptor knocked out to determine whether the hallucinogens still caused head twitching.

After testing many candidate regions, the researchers localized the effects of hallucinogens to the pyramidal neurons in layer V of the somatosensory cortex, a relatively high-level region known to modulate the activity of other sections in the cortex and subcortical areas. Using what he calls an “imperfect but usual analogy,” Stuart Sealfon, a neurologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City likens the receptors to a lock into which both hallucinogenic and nonhallucinogenic keys fit. While LSD may turn this lock to the right, kicking off one set of responses, lisuride turns the tumbler to the left, an action that only causes a subset of those responses. “Both the hallucinogens and the nonhallucinogens activate what we would call the classical signaling cascade downstream of this receptor in these cells,” Sealfon says. “But, the hallucinogens, we show, are activating an additional signaling cascade and we believe the sum of both of them together is probably what causes the effect we see.”

… While Roth concedes that cortical serotonin 2A receptors are likely part of the mechanism of hallucinogenic drugs, Dave Nichols, a molecular pharmacologist at Purdue University, believes the thalamus must be involved in some manner. “The thalamus is the major relay station for sensory information that is sent to the cortex, and there are serotonin 2A receptors localized in the thalamus and the reticular nucleus of the thalamus, which controls the flow of information through the thalamus,” he argues. “For the authors to say that a unique mechanism has been identified that does not involve the thalamus, I therefore think cannot be correct.”

[Scientific American]

Speaking of mice and men and LSD …

Alfred Matthew Hubbard: the original acid prophet —

In 1951, reading The Hibberd Journal, a scientific paper of the time, Hubbard stumbled across an article about the behavior of rats given LSD. “He knew that was it,” says Harman. Hubbard went and found the person conduction the experiment, and came back with some LSD for himself. After his very first acid experience, he became a True Believer.

“Hubbard discovered psychedelics as a boon and a sacrament,” recalls [Timothy] Leary.

… Hubbard’s secret connections allowed him to expose over 6,000 people to LSD before it was effectively banned in ‘66. He shared the sacrament with a prominent Monsignor of the Catholic Church in North America, explored the roots of alcoholism with AA founder Bill Wilson, and stormed the pearly gates with Aldous Huxley (in a session that resulted in the psychedelic tome Heaven and Hell), as well as supplying most of the Beverly Hills psychiatrists, who, in turn, turned on actors Cary Grant, James Coburn, Jack Nicholson, novelist Anais Nin, and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

[Rense.com]

Old news in science fiction, coming soon to a riot-control zone near you ….

Active Denial System (ADS) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD)

The Active Denial System (ADS), an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD), provides a new non-lethal capability helping to fill the gap between the ’shout’ or ’shoot’ alternatives faced by our troops.

It provides numerous advantages over existing non-lethal weapons, such as extended range and extremely small risk of injury, and it has the potential to provide a tremendous new capability for U.S. forces in support of today’s complex missions.

Learn more about ACTDs at http://www.acq.osd.mil/actd/.

Official DoD site for information on the ADS

[Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program]

Active Denial System: the Goodbye Effect

According to documents obtained for Wired News under federal sunshine laws, the Air Force’s Active Denial System, or ADS, has been certified safe after lengthy tests by military scientists in the lab and in war games.

The ADS shoots a beam of millimeters waves, which are longer in wavelength than x-rays but shorter than microwaves — 94 GHz (= 3 mm wavelength) compared to 2.45 GHz (= 12 cm wavelength) in a standard microwave oven.

The longer waves are thought to limit the effects of the radiation. If used properly, ADS will produce no lasting adverse affects, the military argues.

Documents acquired for Wired News using the Freedom of Information Act claim that most of the radiation (83 percent) is instantly absorbed by the top layer of the skin, heating it rapidly.

The beam produces what experimenters call the “Goodbye effect,” or “prompt and highly motivated escape behavior.” In human tests, most subjects reached their pain threshold within 3 seconds, and none of the subjects could endure more than 5 seconds.

“It will repel you,” one test subject said. “If hit by the beam, you will move out of it — reflexively and quickly. You for sure will not be eager to experience it again.”

But while subjects may feel like they have sustained serious burns, the documents claim effects are not long-lasting. At most, “some volunteers who tolerate the heat may experience prolonged redness or even small blisters,” the Air Force experiments concluded.

The reports describe an elaborate series of investigations involving human subjects.

The volunteers were military personnel: active, reserve or retired, who volunteered for the tests. They were unpaid, but the subjects would “benefit from direct knowledge that an effective nonlethal weapon system could soon be in the inventory,” said one report. The tests ranged from simple exposure in the laboratory to elaborate war games involving hundreds of participants.

The military simulated crowd control situations, rescuing helicopter crews in a Black Hawk Down setting and urban assaults. More unusual tests involved alcohol, attack dogs and maze-like obstacle courses.

In more than 10,000 exposures, there were six cases of blistering and one instance of second-degree burns in a laboratory accident, the documents claim.

The ADS was developed in complete secrecy for 10 years at a cost of $40 million. Its existence was revealed in 2001 by news reports, but most details of ADS human testing remain classified. There has been no independent checking of the military’s claims.

[Link: Wired.Com]

Via Boing Boing.

ADS Contracts

On October 4, 2004 the DOD published the following contract information:

Communications and Power Industries (CPI), Palto Alto [sic], Calif., is being awarded a $6,377,762 costs-reimbursement, cost-plus fixed-price contract. The contractor shall design, build, test, and delivery a two to 2.5 megawatt, high efficiency, continuous wave (CW) 95 gigahertz millimeter wave source system. The contractor shall perform extensive modeling, simulation, experiments, and testing to the maximum capabilities of their facilities (which shall no less than one megawatt peak RF output) that will ascertain the final CW capabilities of the source. The contractor also shall provide input for the requirements for the government’s test stand, which will serve as a full power facility in the future. At this time, $900,000 of the funds has been obliged. This work will be complete by January 2009. Negotiations were completed September 2004. The Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, is the contracting activity (FA9451-04-C-0298).

[Wikipedia]

Active Denial Systems: experimental protocols

There were 14 documents [Wired.com] … you can see how the Air Force’s testing evolved from simple experiments on a few square inches of skin into fully fledged war games … the cautious approach of early tests is gradually relaxed as experimenters gain confidence in the system’s supposed safety.

One of the experiments involved giving the subjects carefully measured doses of vodka to see if it helped them withstand the pain.

One test exposed military dog teams to the ADS’ effects, apparently based on the idea that if the device is used for tasks like perimeter security, then there is a real risk of ‘friendly fire’ on dogs as well as humans.

The testing gets serious with an assessment of ADS in an urban environment, in which a whole range of scenarios are described. These typically involve a security force dealing with a red force of aggressors and a number of noncombatant bystanders. There’s a traffic control point set up, route clearance and search and rescue, all of which give some idea of what the ADS is expected to achieve.

… Software used for modeling the pattern of the ADS beam was originally used for checking mobile phone coverage. More importantly, it tells us the safety factor for the ADS: A dangerous dose is approximately four times what anyone can stand. (Which is fine so long as you can get out of the beam: The test protocols specifies that the beam has to be turned off if anyone ends up in the water, as combined beam reflections off the water and the hull could otherwise be dangerous [emphasis added]).

F-BR-2006-0018-H Effects of exposure to 400-W 95-GHz Millimetre Wave Energy on Non-Stationary Humans … practically a future reality game show, in which the contestants have 3 minutes to cross a ‘maze-like’ course and get through a combination-locked gate to escape while multiple ADS beams are used to drive them back.

[Wired.com]

Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System (V-MADS) @ GlobalSecurity.og

Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, a leading newsletter on non-ionizing radiation, calls VMADS a “significant development” in directed energy weapons. However, he says that possible injuries, particularly to the eye, could lead to stopping further development and actual deployment of the device-as the Pentagon did in the mid-1990s when it was trying to develop blinding lasers. “The real question is whether it will go the way of the lasers,” Slesin says. Like laser, exposure to the microwave beam could cause eye damage. “People will get out of the beam, but [injury to the eyes] depends on how much exposure they get,” Slesin says. Slesin also notes that “the only people who are doing health research on the effects of electromagnetic radiation are the people who are developing this weapon-the Air Force Lab. . . . They’re the only people who have any money in the United States to do research on the health effects, and they’re in firm control of the [safety] standard-setting process. . . . That’s a clear conflict.”

… This technology and its proposed use in an operational system have been given a preliminary weapons legal review as required by Department of Defense Directive 3000.3 “Policy for Non-Lethal Weapons,” and the United States’ treaty - obligations. This preliminary review found that further research, development, and testing of this technology is permissible. As required by law, a final, comprehensive legal review will be completed prior to entering the acquisition cycle.

Two primary organizations are executing this program: the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate at Quantico Marine Corps Base, Virginia, and the Air Force Research Laboratory, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The Air Force Research Laboratory is developing the technology with funding from both the Air Force and the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate.

From the Air Force Research Laboratory, two directorates are involved: the Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, and the Human Effectiveness Directorate at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas. The former works technology development and testing; the latter is in charge of biological effects research.

There are three primary contractors: Raytheon AET in Rancho Cucamonga, California, is the systems integrator, CPI (Communications and Power Industries) in Palo Alto, California, is the source developer, and Veridian Engineering in San Antonio, Texas, is performing biological effects research.

Other organizations and agencies that are involved in the this project include the Air Force Force Protection Battlelab at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas; the Marine Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, Virginia; the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field, Florida; and the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

The Air Force’s Electronic Systems Center at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, will manage acquisition of the Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System based on this technology.

[GlobalSecurity.org]

Microwaving Iraq
William Thomas cites an anonymous soldier: microwave “popper” weapons saturating Fallujah

Desperate to improve images of civilian carnage, US commanders are using portable electromagnetic-frequency weapons in Fallujah and other “hot spots” in the Sunni Triangle to pacify restive neighborhoods with invisible EM radiation. “Active Denial” antenna arrays mounted on Humvees are also being deployed to panic and disperse hostile crowds by flash-burning exposed flesh with microwaves. But unintended side effects from the hidden rooftop transmitters are reportedly triggering violent attacks by exposed insurgents — while leading to AWOL rates of up to 15% among US forces disoriented by these same weapons, as well as the electromagnetic emanations from high-power radars, radios and “jammers”.

On the rooftop of a shrapnel-pocked building in the ruins of Fallujah, a team of GI’s stealthily sets up a gray plastic dome about two-feet in diameter. Keeping well back from the sight lines of the street and nearby buildings, they plug the cable connectors on the side of the “popper” into a power unit. The grunts have no clue what the device does. They are just following orders.

“ Most of the worker-bees that are placing these do not even know what is inside the ‘domes’, just that they were told where to place them by Intel weenies with usually no nametag,” reports my source, a very well informed combat veteran I will call “Hank”.

“ Intel” stands for “intelligence” officers who target the most restive neighborhoods in a country gripped by anarchy and chaos. The lack of nametags indicates membership in a spooky “alphabet agency”, either within or outside the military chain of command. Similar “black: teams removed “Made In The USA” chemical weapons from Iraqi trenches after Desert Storm. [Bringing The War Home by William Thomas]

The grunts call the plastic devices “poppers” or “domes”. Once activated, each hidden transmitter emits a widening circle of invisible energy capable of passing through metal, concrete and human skulls up to half a mile away. “They are saturating the area with ULF, VLF and UHF freqs,” Hanks says, with equipment derived from US Navy undersea sonar and communications. But its not being used to locate and talk to submarines under Baghdad.

After powering up the unit, the grunts quickly exit the area. It is their commanders’ fervent hope that any male survivors enraged by brutal American bombardments that damaged virtually every building in this once thriving “City of Mosques”, displacing a quarter-million residents while murdering thousands of children, women and elders in their homes—will lose all incentive for further resistance and revenge.

A dedicated former soldier, whose experiences during and after Desert Storm are chronicled in my book, Bringing The War Home, Hank stays in close touch with his unit serving “in theater” in Iraq. When I asked how many “poppers” are being used to irradiate Iraqi neighborhoods, he checked and got back to me. There are “at least 25 of these that have been deployed to theater, and used. Some have conked out and been removed, so I do not know how many are currently active and broadcasting.”

[William Thomas: Link]

Details of US microwave-weapon tests revealed — July 2005, New Scientist:

The ADS fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam, which is supposed to heat skin and to cause pain but no physical damage (New Scientist, 27 October 2001, p 26). Little information about its effects has been released, but details of tests in 2003 and 2004 were revealed after Edward Hammond, director of the US Sunshine Project - an organisation campaigning against the use of biological and non-lethal weapons - requested them under the Freedom of Information Act.

The tests were carried out at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Two experiments tested pain tolerance levels, while in a third, a “limited military utility assessment”, volunteers played the part of rioters or intruders and the ADS was used to drive them away.

The experimenters banned glasses and contact lenses to prevent possible eye damage to the subjects, and in the second and third tests removed any metallic objects such as coins and keys to stop hot spots being created on the skin. They also checked the volunteers’ clothes for certain seams, buttons and zips which might also cause hot spots.

[New Scientist]

Microwave beam weapon to disperse crowds — New Scientist, October 2001

Last week, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in New Mexico finished testing the system on human volunteers. The Air Force now wants to use this Active Denial Technology (ADT), which it says is non-lethal, for peacekeeping or riot control at “relatively long range” - possibly from low-flying aircraft.

ADT uses a 2-metre dish to create a narrow beam of microwaves that can be scanned across a crowd or even aimed at individuals. AFRL is using infrared photography to analyse the heating effect on the volunteers’ bodies.

AFRL says that the 3-millimetre wavelength radiation penetrates only 0.3 millimetres into the skin, rapidly heating the surface above the 45 °C pain threshold. At 50 °C, they say the pain reflex makes people pull away automatically in less than a second - it’s said to feel like fleetingly touching a hot light bulb. Someone would have to stay in the beam for 250 seconds before it burnt the skin, the lab says, giving “ample margin between intolerable pain and causing a burn”.
Little data

But critics question the AFRL’s claims that the weapon’s undisclosed exposure levels are safe. John Pike of think tank Globalsecurity.org fears that the beam power needed to scare people may be too close to the level that would injure them.

[New Scientist]

Non-Lethal Weapons: a Framework for Future Integration
Air Command and Staff College, Air University research report, 1998

Pulsed High Powered Microwaves (HPM) — Disrupts and neutralizes electronics. Jams or scrambles C2 systems. Shuts down engines, explodes ammunition. Induces confusion, stupor or coma in personnel and animals [emphasis added].
AM/AP

[PDF: Globalsecurity.org]

Non-Lethal Weapons planning circa 1996 –

The advent of an era when the military services were increasingly required to perform Operations Other Than War (OOTW) has led to the need for NLWs. In early 1995, USMC LtGen Anthony Zinni was charged with protecting the final withdrawal of UN forces from Somalia and explored the prospects of using NLW. LtGen Zinni asked for quick response to field a NLW capability. The US Marine Corps and the US Army teamed to provide available NLW technology for use in and around Mogadishu. Although the NLW effects were marginal, LtGen Zinni’s aggressive support added credibility to the NLW effort.

General John J. Sheehan, USACOM Commander, spoke at the Non-Lethal Defense Conference II, which was held in Washington, DC on 07 Mar 96. In his speech given at the conference, General Sheehan examined the global requirements for use of non-lethal weapons and emphasized the necessity for those weapons as standard-issue military hardware. On 09 Jul 96, DoD Directive 3000.3 was issued. The directive established joint service organizational responsibilities and provided guidelines for the development and employment of non-lethal weapons. The directive designated the Commandant of the US Marine Corps as Executive Agent (EA) for the DoD Non-Lethal Weapons Program, with the responsibility of providing “…program recommendations and for stimulating and coordinating non-lethal weapons requirements.”

The Commandant of the Marine Corps has been designated as the Executive Agent for the Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Non-Lethal Weapons (NLW) Program with the responsibility for providing program recommendations and for stimulating and coordinating Joint Non-Lethal Weapon requirements. As the Army’s proponent lead for non-lethal weapons, the Infantry worked closely with the sister services and DoD to develop a coherent joint operational concept. The U.S. Army Military Police School (USAMPS, at Fort Leonard Wood, MO) is the designated single proponent for Army Non-Lethal Applications, effective 12 September 2000. USAMPS serves as the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s single voice for all developments and initiatives to field NL capabilities.

[Globalsecurity.org]

Microwave ovens into microwave weapons — networked tribes, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. An open notebook on the first epochal war of the 21st Century.

Unfortunately, directed energy weapons are much more valuable to global guerrillas than nation-state militaries due to the target imbalance between nation-states and non-state foes. The technology needed to build these weapons is generally available and inexpensive (numerous experiments … with a converted microwave oven demonstrate this). Homemade directed energy weapons will eventually become the weapon of choice for global guerrillas intent on infrastructure destruction.

[John Robb: Global Guerillas]

How To — from Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
– Written in the mid-sixties, set in 2010 AD –

… A large number of recent manufactured products employ honeycomb aluminium sheet bonded with a European adhesive sold here under the name ‘Weldigrip’. This tends to fail when exposed to gamma. Radio Test Source Inc.’s catalog item BVZ26 incorporates a cobalt-60 emitter designed for inspecting high-carbon steel castings up to 9″ thick. It should be placed close to a critical joint …

… The missile-bombardment doors on the North Rockies Acceleratube are sensitive to gamma. The sensor is in a large black container at the eastern entry and at the western it’s in a green conical thing. Those doors weigh over a thousand ton apiece …

… If you have re-evacuation facilities, note that the electron gun in current Admiral TV sets can be modified to deliver a linear instead of a fanned jet. What it does to a sensitive circuit is nobody’s business, but it ought to be …

– From a selection of duplicated, photocopied, holographed, offset, lithoed and printed leaflets on file at Ellay police HQ

[John Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar]

Nikola Tesla — a man ahead of his time, the wizard of energy — grandfather of the Death Ray –

Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a “teleforce” weapon. The press called it a “peace ray” or death ray. In total, the components and methods included:

1. An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished.
2. A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished.
3. A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism.
4. A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention.

Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled “The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media” concerning charged particle beams. Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a “superweapon that would put an end to all war”. This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion).

Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun’s operation:

“[The nozzle would] send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation’s border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.”

Tesla died of heart failure … [January] 1943, at the age of 86 …. Immediately after Tesla’s death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government’s Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was composed of a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called “peace ray” constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisors, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case “most secret”, because of the nature of Tesla’s inventions and patents. One document states that “[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments […]”. Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several “missing” papers and property.

[Wikipedia]

See Also

Microwave News

Nikolai Tesla … an archetype of genius and tragedy.

Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serb family, in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today in Croatia). He was baptised in the Serbian Orthodox Church. His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28, 1856 (Julian calendar); July 10 in the Gregorian calendar ….
[Link]

Tesla disliked Thomas Edison. Upon Edison’s death, most of the remarks made in his epitaph were kind, save those from Tesla, who said of Edison:

“He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene.”

- Tesla on Edison, via Jason Bellows @ DamnInteresting.com: Link

Via Boing Boing