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US diplomats' brains were shrunk by sonic attacks at Cuban embassy, study finds
- groestl 7y agoWhat about sleep deprivation and stress (possibly caused by the sounds)?
- webmobdev 7y agoHow do they know that their brains weren't small to begin with? Are they measuring against an average?
- wysifnwyg 7y agoWhile it doesn't say in the article, I would imagine that the statistical difference is significant enough to recognize that this specific group had been impacted when considering an average adult human's measurements.
- diggan 7y agoSeems to be refering to this study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2738552 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/27385... > Design, Setting, and Participants: Forty government personnel (patients) who were potentially exposed and experienced neurological symptoms underwent evaluation at a US academic medical center from August 21, 2017, to June 8, 2018, including advanced structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging analytics. Findings were compared with imaging findings of 48 demographically similar healthy controls.
- CoolGuySteve 7y agoWould it be politically incorrect to compare the average diplomats brain against an average adult? What if we find out diplomats just have small brains.
- dipeshsharma 7y agoThey are measuring against average sizes for people of similar group. Size being smaller thank average for all staff members is definitely raises suspicion.
- wysifnwyg 7y agoI never expected to see a headline like this. This is certainly an exciting dystopian future we're living in.
- deminature 7y agoI'm not sure the affected parties would agree with the descriptor 'exciting'.
- holstvoogd 7y agothat is because it is a bit click-baity :) smaller than average brain size? yes. caused by 'sonic attacks'? who knows, could be anything.
- fredsanford 7y agoThe headline feels like a teaser ad for an episode of Gilligan's Island.
- Someone1234 7y agoThe real take-away from this article is: These people are legitimately ill. But we still are no closer to knowing what caused it or by whom. The previously released sound recordings are likely made by Indies short-tailed crickets. There's been a lot of finger pointing, but until we know HOW this was done it may be hard to figure out WHO conducted it, or even if it was man-made at all (e.g. disease).
- noipv4 7y agoWas it a sonic attack? or some drug which destroys brain tissue, and as a side effect messes with sound processing parts of the brain too.
- Canadauni 7y agoThis is an interesting theory. Probably one of the more plausible ones. I imagine some sort of biological or toxicological attack could cause some sound processing related symptoms. On the wild end of things one could imagine it being a combination of sonic and chemical attack where the an innocuous chemical structure became active as a result of high frequency sound.
- emeraldd 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonochemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonochemistry I have no idea about that application, but the idea of using sound in chemistry seems to actually be a thing ...
- Canadauni 7y agoAt risk of oversimplification, sound is just energy and given the right amount of energy chemical changes can be carried out.
- jessaustin 7y agoIt may not actually have anything to do with sound. The recordings offered as "proof" (of what, we can only guess) have all been explained as normal innocuous sounds.
- david_draco 7y agoMost academic literature attributes the complaints (which are inconsistent with each other and span ambassadors of some countries but not others), to a mass psychogenic event. You can find out more here: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4603 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4603
- erentz 7y agoAnd this is shaping up to be yet another case where doctors and researchers ignored what their patients were telling them and labelled an illness as psychogenic when it wasn't. Through history doctors have all too often assumed their current testing capabilities were perfect and there was nothing more to learn. Thus if a patient looks normal on tests of the day then they must be imagining the problem and they label it psychogenic. Then this can't be disproved until new technology or research reveals how wrong this label was. People should think about the amount of grief these people and others through history have suffered due to this.
- arkades 7y ago> And this is shaping up to be yet another case where doctors and researchers ignored what their patients were telling No, it’s a case where doctors and researchers disagreed with one another and continued gathering data to try and reach a more definitive conclusion. Who, exactly, do you think was doing the MRI studies on their brains and publishing it in JAMA?
- erentz 7y agoI don’t really know what your point is. The fact that some researchers or doctors were more diligent, scientifically principled, and didn’t fall into the “no evidence yet == psychogenic” trap, does not free those that did from the criticism. Those that do label illnesses psychogenic without any evidence do harm to patients. They cause grief, delay or hinder access to further research, and so forth.
- dmix 7y ago
- threezero 7y agoAssuming that there was in fact shrinking, could that be caused by being in a warm climate for an extended period of time? Studies have shown that heat affects cognitive ability, but has anyone ever studied if there’s a temporary efect on brain size? https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002605 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
- jryb 7y agoI think someone would have noticed, for example, the entire population of Cuba.
- Circuits 7y ago" US diplomats' brains were shrunk by sonic attacks at Cuban embassy, study finds " - that is not at all what the study has found. What a terrible and misleading title for an article. Talk about pointing fingers...
- trhway 7y agomy favorite theory of those sounds - the people hearing (and affected by) them is just a sideeffect of the sound attack on electronics by generating suitable intermodulation distortion (IMD) : https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-reverse-engineered-the-cuban-sonic-weapon-attack https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-reve... "Computer science researchers have explored the physics of IMD. In the DolphinAttack paper, we used ultrasonic signals to trick a smartphone’s voice-recognition assistant. Because of nonlinearity in the smartphone’s microphone, the ultrasound produced by-products at audible frequencies inside the circuitry of the microphone. Thus, the IMD signal remains inaudible to humans, but the smartphone hears voices. In an early 2017 paper, Nirupam Roy, Haitham Hassanieh, and Romit Roy Choudhury at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign described their BackDoor system [PDF] for using ultrasound and IMD to jam spy microphones, watermark music played at live concerts, and otherwise create “shadow” sounds." Your Siri is talking to the voices in her head... Conspiracy theory wise i'd think (ie. hope that "at least some of my tax dollars at work") that NSA uses such tools too, and this is why everybody is so mum about it.
- phy6 7y agoI wonder if there could be a mashup between IMD and BadBIOS/ultrasonic communication https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03422.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03422.pdf
- lightbyte 7y agoI remember listening to a segment on NPR where it was claimed this was already solved and the "sonic attacks" were actually caused by a specific species of cricket: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/25/704903613/doubts-rise-about-evidence-that-u-s-diplomats-in-cuba-were-attacked https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/25/7049036...
- zamalek 7y agoThe article covers this.
- Johnny555 7y agoThat headline seems inaccurate -- I was surprised when it seemed to point to "sonic attacks" being the definitive cause of the brain abnormality, but it's not: “The study supports the validity of the patients report of symptoms, but doesn’t answer the question of whether they have had a brain injury or not or whether the exposure they report is relevant." So something happened, but no one knows what caused it.
- squidproquo 7y agoWhat I don't understand is how these "studies" seem to find things that would require a baseline to compare with. Results like, brain damage was suffered, cognitive impairment, brain-shrinkage, all would require the subjects to have some baseline snapshot before the "sonic attacks" occurred.
- sandino 7y agoRather than simply having "shrunk" these brains -- according to at least on other summary article, the team's findings were rather less conclusive: But the medical team that performed the scans said the findings were not conclusive. They do not match what is normally seen in brain injuries and the severity of symptoms did not vary with the extent of the brain differences spotted. “It’s a unique presentation that we have not seen before,” said Ragini Verma, a professor of biomedical imaging on the team at the University of Pennsylvania. “What caused it? I’m completely unequipped to answer that.” Independent experts agreed the findings were inconclusive and said it was still unclear whether the diplomats were victims of any attack or had suffered related brain injuries. The apparent abnormalities might have pre-dated the attacks, they said, and could have more mundane explanations such as anxiety or depression. One said the study did not meet the usual standards for publication. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/23/brain-scans-of-us-embassy-staff-to-cuba-show-abnormalities https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/23/brain-scans-...
- tim333 7y agoThey say sonic attacks but reading the various articles is seems quite likely it was microwaves https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack-cuba-microwave.html?module=inline https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack-cuba... I wonder if microwave damage would be consistent with the effects found.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]