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Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers

nytimes.com

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Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers

#111

Post by thefounder »

wruza wrote: post #106
thefounder wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that as the leader of the free world U.S has certain responsibilities that go beyond its borders. If it can do something good (i.e overthrow a dictator) and perhaps serves its interests as well(make new friends) I don't see why it shouldn't do that. It's a win-win. See South and North Korea situation to understand what difference it makes a successful intervention.

Which countries experienced something good from a succesful US intervention? Why does US criticize other win-win interventions?

South Korea, West Germany are two examples. Compare that with North Korea and East Germany

Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers

#112

Post by wruza »

thefounder wrote: post #111
wruza wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which countries experienced something good from a succesful US intervention? Why does US criticize other win-win interventions?

South Korea, West Germany are two examples. Compare that with North Korea and East Germany

Was that intervention or just results of WW2? Recent examples? Why doesn’t US free DPRK now that USSR gone and it is weaker than ever?

Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers

#113

Post by alexandercrohde »

mrb wrote: post #58
neuroma wrote: post #7

Okay I'm skeptical. On the one side some 'bad other' could be using an undefined device to attack only American people, only in foreign lands, and for uncertain reasons. That narrative conveniently fuels paranoia and makes for good reading. Alternative explanations exist, based on well established medicine, which I think need air time, link below. Now, I'm all for exciting stories but this one keeps being resurrected…

Your link is the first time I hear of mass psychogenic illness. Quite an interesting phenomenon. I particularly liked the case below from 1972. It seems MPI could very well explain these incidents. « In a mid-western university town of over 50,000 population, a strange case of "gas poisoning" occurred on a Wednesday morning early in March, 1972. Approximately thirty-five female workers at the University's data proces…

Doesn't this contradict the notion that these diplomats experienced mass psychogenic illness?

What you describe is a temporary disturbance highly susceptible to (and terminated by) the power of suggestion, no? It sounds like what the diplomats experienced is different in both respects.

Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers

#114

Post by plmpsu »

madengr wrote: post #98
sandworm101 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It would also be very easy to detect with basic test equipment Like laptops, cellphones not working. Sparks from coke cans. Chocolate bars melting in pockets. I'd think the fire risk would be too great to attempt this in an uncontrolled public space.

It doesn’t take THAT much power. The paper says effects took an average power of ~1 mW/cm^2, with a 0.0001 duty factor. That’s not much from a heating standpoint, but extremely strong for detectability. That average power is about what your phone delivers to your head. The peak power is massive, but it doesn’t last long, so the energy is weak. To get the equivalent peak power, you’d have to put 10k phones against you…

> If you put your head in a 1 kW microwave oven, and pulse modulated the magnetron, your could maybe get the effect. It would make an entertaining YouTube video.

Sound like an Infinite Jest footnote.

Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers

#115

Post by maxander »

subcosmos wrote: post #86
raziel2701 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can still do that with my cheap computer speakers!

In my headphones, when I pause any music that is playing, I can hear data transferring too/from my nvidia GPU while training deep neural networks. Ive used this technique to get a greater sense of the memory performance.

That's interesting. Certainly, we've all been cued by the sound of our hard disks that something in our code was wrong or that our computer is up to something unexpected; now that disks are getting quieter and/or replaced by SSDs we lose that important "feature." As code-relevant hardware gets more complex (GPUs and other outboard processors, interaction with robotics or media headsets, etc what-have-you) that sort of hardware-level diagnostic should become more useful, rather than less. Has anyone tried to get this to happen on purpose? E.g., little electrical taps on relevant bus cables, with an audio jack.

Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers

#116

Post by delbel »

no_identd wrote: post #100
madengr wrote: post #10

RF/Microwave EE here. I actually tried this on myself several years ago with no effect. Specifically 20W at C-band into a 10 dBi standard gain horn a few feet away, pulse mod to 1 kHz. That was still not near enough power density. While it’s plausible, it would take a big effort to affect this many people. The peak power densities, as described in the paper, would be tens of W/cm^2; e.g. radar transmitters and big an…

I'll quote Allan H. Frey, who more-or-less(preceeded by some italian engineers, iirc) invented the entire field, from 1996 on usenet: >There is a microwave hearing effect that occurs at very low power densities and a skull vibration effect that occurs when very high energies are applied to the head. There is some confusion in the literature because the vibration effect has often been referred to as a microwave hearin…

Curious if you know, what's the low down on 5g? Is it safe? What about rural ares where they can jack up the range? Lots of conspiracy theories floating around there, some vaguely concerned. My cause for concern is zero precautionary principle approach to the technology.

Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers

#117

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Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers

#118

Post by nickysielicki »

madengr wrote: post #17
aswanson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why in the world did you try this on yourself?

Curiosity. Why not? It’s not inherently dangerous. I’ve had real RF burns from tuning high power microwave amps. The RADAR tick is EE folklore, from your brain expanding a few microns at the pulse rate. As I said, takes a huge power density to do this. Cataracts are an issue with long term exposure. I guess we’ll know in the near future if this group of people has a higher incidence of cataracts.

Tell me more about your microwave amp RF burns, are you into amateur EME comms?

Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers

#119

Post by rleigh »

madengr wrote: post #108
no_identd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll quote Allan H. Frey, who more-or-less(preceeded by some italian engineers, iirc) invented the entire field, from 1996 on usenet: >There is a microwave hearing effect that occurs at very low power densities and a skull vibration effect that occurs when very high energies are applied to the head. There is some confusion in the literature because the vibration effect has often been referred to as a microwave hearin…

The mmWaves can easily be wave guided into the inner ear, as 1/2 wavelength at 60 GHz is 2.5 mm. I read a few years ago about electric fields of very high dV/dt being used to temporarily open cell walls. The patients blood was transfused through the apparatus. This was used to enhance chemotherapy, and provided some benefit.

Electric fields used in this way have long been used in commercial products, e.g. Amaxa nucleofection (https://bioscience.lonza.com/lonza_bs/CH/en/nucleofector-tec...) and Neon electroporation (https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/references/gibco-cel...). I used both a decade back on mammalian cells. Bog standard electroporation has been used far longer back for bacterial cells.

Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers

#120

Post by scottlocklin »

tim333 wrote: post #95
scottlocklin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a series of fairly unlikely assertions backed with plausible looking narrative and interviews. Pretty typical for the NYT these days, and very sad. IEEE Spectrum did a series of articles on this; I thought the mostly likely explanation was ultrasound jammers and intermodulation distortion. Aka defective gear; which is why the same thing seems to have happened in China as well as Cuba.

There's a link to one of the IEEE articles here https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-reve... with a recording of sounds recorded at the embassy and their attempts to reproduce it. To me the microwave theory seems a better fit.

This is the one I had in mind:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/finally-a-l...

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