tag > RadioBio
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CIA director “fuming” after Havana syndrome strikes team member in India - "Some officials fear the incidents are increasing and escalating, leaving officers on edge."
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Human reproductive cloning: The curious incident of the dog in the night-time - By Henry T. Greely (2020)
"Sometimes what doesn’t happen is as interesting as what does. Cloning human embryos has been possible for nearly seven years. Yet as far as I know, during that time no one has made a cloned baby or, apparently, has tried to make one. And what I find most surprising is that no one has announced they intend to make one. Why is this ?"
Talks by Henry T. Greely
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Kamala Harris' Flight To Vietnam Delayed Over Alleged 'Havana Syndrome' Incident
US VP Kamala Harris was unable to depart Singapore for Vietnam according to the schedule of her southeast Asia tour due to an unnamed 'health incident'. Her plane was delayed for there hours, according to reports. The State Department has confirmed the delay is due to a possible "anomalous health incident" - after the US Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam communicated the incident to her office in Washington. Crucially, US officials have typically reserved this term for what's become known as "Havana Syndrome"
"Virtue has a veil, vice a mask." - Victor Hugo 
The show must go on. 
"The Revolution Will (Not) Be Televised" -
Price of Portable Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Devices
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Genetically engineered 'Magneto' protein remotely controls brain & behaviour (Guardian)
"Researchers in the United States have developed a new method for controlling the brain circuits associated with complex animal behaviours, using genetic engineering to create a magnetised protein that activates specific groups of nerve cells from a distance."
(paper)
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The Rise of Neurotechnology Calls for a Parallel Focus on Neurorights - By Nayef Al-Rodhan
Chile is leading the way with a bill that offers protections against abuses and inequities that could arise from technologies that augment human capacities.
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Flipping a Switch Inside the Head (Rockefeller University)
With new technology, scientists are able to exert wireless control over brain cells of mice with just the push of a button. The first thing they did was make the mice hungry.
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CIA Director Says He Is Escalating Efforts To Solve 'Havana Syndrome' Mystery (npr.org)
"Under Burns' direction, the CIA has tripled the number of full-time medical personnel at the agency who are focused on Havana syndrome and has shortened the waiting period for afflicted personnel to be admitted to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. "I'm certainly persuaded that what our officers and some family members, as well as other U.S. government employees, have experienced is real, and it's serious," Burns said. The director says he is seriously considering the "very strong possibility" that the syndrome is the result of intentional actions, adding that there are a limited number of "potential suspects" with the capability to carry out an action so widely across the globe. A report from last December by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that microwave radiation is the "most plausible" explanation for the symptoms."
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Research on the “Phantom Effect” - Presentation by Serge Kernbach (Cybertronica Research)
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About 24 US Govt Officials in Vienna, Austria Report 'Havana Syndrome' Symptoms (newyorker)
U.S. officials say the number of possible new cases in the Austrian capital — long a nexus of U.S. and Russian espionage — is now greater than the number reported by officials in any city except for Havana itself, where the first cases were reported. The exact cause of the ailments in Vienna, which U.S. government agencies formally refer to as "anomalous health incidents" or "unexplained health incidents," remains unknown, but in response to the surge the C.I.A., the State Department, and other agencies are redoubling their efforts to determine the cause, and to identify the culprit or culprits...
The Havana Syndrome derives its name from the Cuban capital, where C.I.A. officers and State Department employees first reported experiencing strange sensations of sound and pressure in their heads in 2016 and 2017. Some of the patients said the sensations seemed to follow them around their homes, apartments, and hotel rooms in the Cuban capital. Some of the patients described feeling as though they were standing in an invisible beam of energy. Many of them suffered debilitating symptoms, from headaches and vertigo to vision problems. Specialists at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Brain Injury and Repair used advanced MRIs to study the brains of forty of the original patients from Havana. They found no signs of physical impact to the patients' skulls — it was as if they had "a concussion without a concussion," one specialist told me — and the team detected signs of damage to their brains.
Senior officials in the Trump and Biden Administrations suspect that the Russians are responsible for the syndrome. Their working hypothesis is that operatives working for the G.R.U., the Russian military-intelligence service, have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at U.S. officials, possibly to steal data from their computers or smartphones, which inflicted serious harm on the people they targeted. But American intelligence analysts and operatives have so far been unable to find concrete evidence that would allow them to declare that either microwave radiation or the Russians were to blame.
The article also points out that the CIA's director has privately called the incidents "attacks" rather than incidents or illnesses.
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Excerpt from "Rogue Agent - The Cercle and the 6I in the Private Cold War 1951 - 1991" - by David Teacher
“In August 1959, ['Cees'] Van den Heuvel set up a foundation for research into human ecology based in the Hague. The title is indicative, if not conclusive: in 1955, the CIA had founded a Society for the Study of Human Ecology which changed name in 1961 to become the Human Ecology Fund. Both American organizations were funding conduits for the CIA's MK-ULTRA programme of research into mind control and brainwashing. Van den Heuvel's human ecology foundation would soon change titles to the Oost-West Stichting (East-West Foundation), which received funding from the BVD. According to an Italian secret service (SIFAR) report dated October 1963, the BVD funded a meeting in Barbizon near Paris on 5th - 8th October 1961 where "the participants decided to unite all efforts and initiatives of the struggle against Communism within a new organization and place these on a serious and expert footing."
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US Senate Finally Admits that Neuroweapons Exist, Passes Bill to Help Diplomat-Victims
In a reversal of the established commentary that those claiming victimization by electronic weaponry are crazy and delusional, the US Senate has passed a Bill authorizing payment to CIA and State Department officials who have been attacked by this weaponry. Recent news reports have detailed these attacks on US diplomats in Cuba and China. Dubbed “The Havana Syndrome,” it was recently reported that CIA personnel have also suffered such attacks in Europe and Asia. Senate Bill 1828, the “Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks Act of 2021, or the HAVANA Act of 2021,” authorizes payment to qualified employees for brain injuries inflicted by neuroweaponry.
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'This is not science fiction,' say scientists pushing for 'neuro-rights' (Reuters)
Scientific advances from deep brain stimulation to wearable scanners are making manipulation of the human mind increasingly possible, creating a need for laws and protections to regulate use of the new tools, top neurologists said on Thursday. A set of “neuro-rights” should be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations, said Rafael Yuste, a neuroscience professor at New York’s Columbia University and organizer of the Morningside Group of scientists and ethicists proposing such standards.
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Magnetogenetics - "using magnetic fields to remotely control cell activity"
"Here, we show that, by complexing magnetic nanoparticles with recombinant baculoviral vectors (MNP-BVs), CRISPR–Cas9-mediated genome editing can be activated locally in vivo via a magnetic field." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-018-0318-7
Non-contact long-range magnetic stimulation of mechanosensitive ion channels in freely moving animals: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-020-00896-y
Genetically targeted magnetic control of the nervous system: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4265?WT.feed_name=subjects_neural-circuit
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Mindblowing: advances in brain tech spur push for 'neuro-rights'
by Alberto PEÑA, April 29, 2021
As sci-fi thriller "Inception" topped box offices across the world, audiences were delighted and appalled by its futuristic story of a criminal gang invading people's dreams to steal valuable data.
More than a decade on, the technology envisioned by filmmaker Christopher Nolan is likely not far off, according to experts in Chile, who have moved the security debate beyond burglar alarms to safeguarding the most valuable real estate people ever own: their minds.
The South American nation is aiming to be the world's first to legally protect citizens' "neuro-rights," with lawmakers expected to pass a constitutional reform blocking technology that seeks to "increase, diminish or disturb" people's mental integrity without their consent.
Opposition senator Guido Girardi, one of the authors of the legislation, is worried about technology -- whether algorithms, bionic implants or some other gadgetry -- that could threaten "the essence of humans, their autonomy, their freedom and their free will."
"If this technology manages to read (your mind), before even you're aware of what you're thinking," he told AFP, "it could write emotions into your brain: life stories that aren't yours and that your brain won't be able to distinguish whether they were yours or the product of designers."
- 'Prevent manipulation' -
Scores of sci-fi movies and novels have offered audiences the dark side of neurotechnology -- perhaps invoking criminal masterminds ensconced in secret strongholds, manipulating the world with a dastardly laugh while stroking a cat.
In fact, the nascent technology has already demonstrated how it can have significantly positive applications.
In 2013, then-US president Barack Obama promoted the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neuro-technologies) initiative, which aimed to study the causes of brain disorders such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and epilepsy.
Back in Chile, Science Minister Andres Couve told AFP the neuro-rights debate "is part of a consolidation of a new scientific institutionality in the country that is now capturing international attention."
But many are worried about the potential for nefarious actors to abuse technological advances.
Chile's President Sebastian Pinera proposed at last week's Ibero-American summit in Andorra that countries legislate together on the thorny issue.
"I call on all Ibero-American countries to anticipate the future and to adequately protect, now, not just our citizens' data and information, but also their thoughts, their feelings, their neuronal information, to prevent these from being manipulated by new technologies," the conservative Pinera said.
The Chilean bill contains four main fields of legislation: guarding the human mind's data, or neuro-data; fixing limits to the neuro-technology of reading and especially writing in brains; setting an equitable distribution and access to these technologies; and putting limits on neuro-algorithms.
Spanish scientist Rafael Yuste, an expert on the subject from Columbia University in New York, told AFP some of these technologies already exist, and even the most remote will be available within 10 years.
- 'A new Renaissance' -
They are already being applied to animals in laboratories.
Scientists have experimented with rats, implanting images of unfamiliar objects in their brains and observing how they accept those objects in real life as their own and incorporate them into their natural behavior.
"If you can enter there (into the chemical processes of the brain) and stimulate or inhibit them, you can change people's decisions. This is something we've already done with animals," said Yuste.
The science has opened the possibility of designing hybrid humans with artificially enhanced cognitive abilities.
The risk is that, without proper safeguards, the technology might be used to alter people's thoughts, employing algorithms via the internet to re-program their hard wiring, to dictate their interests, preferences or patterns of consumption.
"To avoid a two-speed situation with some enhanced humans and others who aren't, we believe these neuro-technologies need to be regulated along principles of universal justice, recognizing the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," said Yuste.
Yuste considers neuro-technology a "tsunami" that humanity will have to deal with, which is why people need to be prepared.
"Neuro-technology can be scary if you think about dystopian science-fiction scenarios. However, for every dystopian scenario, there are 10 beneficial ones," said Yuste, who sees neuro-technology as "a new Renaissance for humanity."
Already, neuro-technologies are used on patients suffering from Parkinson's or depression by stimulating the brain with electrodes to "alleviate the symptoms," said Yuste.
Similarly, deaf people are treated with "cochlear implants in the auditory nerve" that stimulate the brain.
It is hoped that something similar in the future will restore sight to the blind or treat those with Alzheimer's by strengthening the memory's neuronal circuits.
"It will be a beneficial change for the human race," said Yuste.
apg/bc/ft
Related Video discussing this article.
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Evidence for a Human Geomagnetic Sense (caltec)
Scientists develop a robust experiment that shows human brain waves respond to changes in Earth-strength magnetic fields. Many humans are able to unconsciously detect changes in Earth-strength magnetic fields, according to scientists at Caltech and the University of Tokyo.
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Under the new initiative, with the acronym ICEMAN, DARPA is seeking a contractor to measure the electromagnetic fields inside cockpits, especially signals between 9 kHz and 1 GHz and then determine whether they might affect the performance of pilots. ICEMAN is short for Impact of Cockpit Electro-Magnetics on Aircrew Neurology.
In its request for proposals, DARPA states that, “Current cockpits are flooded with RF noise from on-board emissions, communication links, and navigation electronics, including strong EM fields from audio headsets and helmet tracking technologies.” The agency notes that current tactical audio headsets project magnetic fields that are up to 10 times the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field —that is, approximately 5 G (0.5 mT). DARPA continues:
“Recent DARPA-funded research has demonstrated that human brains sense magnetic fields, like those used by animals for navigation, and that this process is ‘jammed’ (i.e., disrupted) by radio waves (RF), impacting brainwaves and behavior. Furthermore, recent findings were the first to show that even weak RF fields and ‘Earth strength’ magnetic fields have measurable, reproducible effects on human brainwaves and unconscious behavior in a controlled environment.”
The “recent research” refers to work carried out under DARPA’s RadioBio program, announced in 2017. One of its objectives was to see whether living cells can communicate with neighboring cells using EM signals and, if so, what the cells are telling each other and how they do it. Joe Kirschvink at Caltech, a RadioBio contractor, has reported that human brain waves respond to changes in magnetic fields on the order of the Earth's field.
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DOD Officials Discuss Quantum Science, 5G and Directed Energy
"There's a clear, well-defined path to get to a very substantial laser capability," he said. "There's a smaller effort in microwave [technology] area going on."
