Jun 4, 2018 03:29 AM
Here’s why scientists are questioning whether ‘sonic attacks’ are real
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scie...s-are-real
EXCERPT: An account of another alleged “sonic attack” has surfaced, this time from a U.S. government employee in China. The employee reported “subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure,” according to a U.S. Embassy health alert. The episode mirrors reports from American diplomats in Cuba in late 2016, and fuels the debate among scientists about what, if anything, is actually happening.
Last year, 24 of the diplomats who reported sonic attacks in Cuba were tested to gauge whether lasting harm had occurred. In March, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia reported in JAMA that the people had balance and thinking problems, sleep disturbances and headaches, and that some had widespread injury to brain networks.
But some scientists and engineers have been questioning whether such attacks are possible, and if the diplomats’ symptoms could have been caused by a sonic attack.
The attacks were supposedly committed with sounds outside the range of human hearing. But generating enough acoustical energy to cause hearing loss and brain damage from those types of sound waves would be no easy feat, says Andrew Oxenham, a hearing researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The intensity of very low frequency infrasound or very high frequency ultrasound drops rapidly over distance, so attackers would need enormous loud speakers to have enough intensity to do neurological harm.
“Even to get across the street and into a building, you’d have to have a loud speaker the size of a building,” Oxenham says.
It might be possible to focus ultrasound into a tight beam to stage a high-intensity ultrasound attack. But even with such a beam it would be difficult to make a device small enough to be used as a handheld weapon, says Tyrone Porter, a biomedical engineer at Boston University. And that device would be more likely to lead to disorientation than brain damage, he says.
Very little data exist on whether and how ultrasound in the air affects human health....
MORE: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scie...s-are-real
Russia's anti-GMO campaign
https://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/fact...nce-russia
EXCERPT: . . . In the Factor GMO project, the panelists explained, thousands of rats would eat genetically modified corn that had been grown with Roundup, a controversial weed killer. Scientists would then watch the animals for three years, round the clock, to see if they developed cancer or fertility problems.
“We hope this will be the definitive study that will establish whether or not these chemicals and these GMO products are safe and effective,” Bruce Blumberg, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine, a longtime GMO critic and one of the three scientists originally on the project’s advisory board, told the crowd of reporters.
The event attracted wide news coverage [...] Now more than three years later, the Moscow-based Factor GMO is not answering emails from the press. Although the donation button is still active on its website, the effort hasn’t uttered a peep since 2015. So, how much money did it raise? Did scientists ever watch any rats?
Or was it all a ruse from the get-go, a grand Russian propaganda effort against GMOs and Western science?
"Factor GMO has many of the hallmark characteristics of Russian anti-GMO propaganda, though it gives itself a veneer of scientific objectivity," Iowa State sociologist Shawn Dorius told BuzzFeed News.
Russia, as it turns out, has pushed a lot of anti-GMO propaganda in this decade [...] That’s partly because of the competition: Cheap GMO crops from the US could threaten Russia’s agricultural market, and particularly its recent boom in wheat exports.
But these messages serve another purpose, too: to sow distrust in Western innovations, whether agricultural science, fracking, or elections, said Nina Jankowicz, a scholar of Russian disinformation tactics. “The basic idea is to create doubts in people’s minds, whether about Big Agriculture, or chemtrails, or anything else.”
[...] A decade ago, Russian researchers created potatoes that borrowed a gene (“kindly provided by Monsanto”) from a harmless bacteria to make the spuds resistant to beetles. The GMO potatoes were approved by the state. But after Vladimir Putin returned as president in 2012, Russia’s anti-GMO efforts kicked off. [...] Then in 2015, Putin announced plans to make Russia the world’s biggest exporter of non-GMO food. [...] Russia banned GMOs completely a year later. (Europe has imposed stringent rules on GMOs since 2010.)
[...] By 2016, RT and Sputnik, the two main Kremlin-owned outlets producing stories in English, were preoccupied by — and strongly negative toward — GMOs, according to a March study conducted by Dorius of Iowa State. His team scraped the websites of RT, Sputnik, CNN, Fox News, Breitbart, and Huffington Post to find all stories in that year that mentioned GMOs. They found that RT and Sputnik produced 53% of all English-language stories in the study. And their stories were overwhelmingly opposed to GMOs — unlike the US outlets, which produced a mix of anti, pro, and neutral stories on the topic.
The survey found that RT’s stories often contained scaremongering myths about genetic engineering [...] “It is typically designed to look like legitimate news,” Dorius said.
MORE: https://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/fact...nce-russia
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scie...s-are-real
EXCERPT: An account of another alleged “sonic attack” has surfaced, this time from a U.S. government employee in China. The employee reported “subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure,” according to a U.S. Embassy health alert. The episode mirrors reports from American diplomats in Cuba in late 2016, and fuels the debate among scientists about what, if anything, is actually happening.
Last year, 24 of the diplomats who reported sonic attacks in Cuba were tested to gauge whether lasting harm had occurred. In March, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia reported in JAMA that the people had balance and thinking problems, sleep disturbances and headaches, and that some had widespread injury to brain networks.
But some scientists and engineers have been questioning whether such attacks are possible, and if the diplomats’ symptoms could have been caused by a sonic attack.
The attacks were supposedly committed with sounds outside the range of human hearing. But generating enough acoustical energy to cause hearing loss and brain damage from those types of sound waves would be no easy feat, says Andrew Oxenham, a hearing researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The intensity of very low frequency infrasound or very high frequency ultrasound drops rapidly over distance, so attackers would need enormous loud speakers to have enough intensity to do neurological harm.
“Even to get across the street and into a building, you’d have to have a loud speaker the size of a building,” Oxenham says.
It might be possible to focus ultrasound into a tight beam to stage a high-intensity ultrasound attack. But even with such a beam it would be difficult to make a device small enough to be used as a handheld weapon, says Tyrone Porter, a biomedical engineer at Boston University. And that device would be more likely to lead to disorientation than brain damage, he says.
Very little data exist on whether and how ultrasound in the air affects human health....
MORE: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scie...s-are-real
Russia's anti-GMO campaign
https://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/fact...nce-russia
EXCERPT: . . . In the Factor GMO project, the panelists explained, thousands of rats would eat genetically modified corn that had been grown with Roundup, a controversial weed killer. Scientists would then watch the animals for three years, round the clock, to see if they developed cancer or fertility problems.
“We hope this will be the definitive study that will establish whether or not these chemicals and these GMO products are safe and effective,” Bruce Blumberg, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine, a longtime GMO critic and one of the three scientists originally on the project’s advisory board, told the crowd of reporters.
The event attracted wide news coverage [...] Now more than three years later, the Moscow-based Factor GMO is not answering emails from the press. Although the donation button is still active on its website, the effort hasn’t uttered a peep since 2015. So, how much money did it raise? Did scientists ever watch any rats?
Or was it all a ruse from the get-go, a grand Russian propaganda effort against GMOs and Western science?
"Factor GMO has many of the hallmark characteristics of Russian anti-GMO propaganda, though it gives itself a veneer of scientific objectivity," Iowa State sociologist Shawn Dorius told BuzzFeed News.
Russia, as it turns out, has pushed a lot of anti-GMO propaganda in this decade [...] That’s partly because of the competition: Cheap GMO crops from the US could threaten Russia’s agricultural market, and particularly its recent boom in wheat exports.
But these messages serve another purpose, too: to sow distrust in Western innovations, whether agricultural science, fracking, or elections, said Nina Jankowicz, a scholar of Russian disinformation tactics. “The basic idea is to create doubts in people’s minds, whether about Big Agriculture, or chemtrails, or anything else.”
[...] A decade ago, Russian researchers created potatoes that borrowed a gene (“kindly provided by Monsanto”) from a harmless bacteria to make the spuds resistant to beetles. The GMO potatoes were approved by the state. But after Vladimir Putin returned as president in 2012, Russia’s anti-GMO efforts kicked off. [...] Then in 2015, Putin announced plans to make Russia the world’s biggest exporter of non-GMO food. [...] Russia banned GMOs completely a year later. (Europe has imposed stringent rules on GMOs since 2010.)
[...] By 2016, RT and Sputnik, the two main Kremlin-owned outlets producing stories in English, were preoccupied by — and strongly negative toward — GMOs, according to a March study conducted by Dorius of Iowa State. His team scraped the websites of RT, Sputnik, CNN, Fox News, Breitbart, and Huffington Post to find all stories in that year that mentioned GMOs. They found that RT and Sputnik produced 53% of all English-language stories in the study. And their stories were overwhelmingly opposed to GMOs — unlike the US outlets, which produced a mix of anti, pro, and neutral stories on the topic.
The survey found that RT’s stories often contained scaremongering myths about genetic engineering [...] “It is typically designed to look like legitimate news,” Dorius said.
MORE: https://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/fact...nce-russia
