Science Channel - Is This a Good Idea?

Iron Man Suits, for Real?

I confess that I haven’t yet seen the box-office smash Iron Man, but when I was a kid, I was an avid fan of the Marvel comic book adventures of inventive industrialist Tony Stark and the powered armored suit that he used to battle the Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man and other nefarious agents of the international communist conspiracy. (For millennials out there who may be puzzled by the last reference, this was back in the days of the Cold War, before the NHL was filled with Russian hockey players and the Chinese began manufacturing iPods and running shoes.) What scrawny pre-adolescent wouldn’t want to be incredibly strong, bulletproof and able to smash through walls without even breaking a sweat? It was a tantalizing fantasy. Judging from the movie’s $100 million opening gross, it still is.
But what about having one of those Iron Man suits for real? What we’re actually talking about is a powered exoskeleton, a mobile machine with a skeleton-like framework and a power source that augments — or even replaces — the biochemical processes of the human body to move its mechanized limbs. Since 2000, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been funding research to develop such devices. As a recent article in Popular Science reports:

DARPA’s ambitious wish list read like something from a comic: a machine that would let the average soldier lug hundreds of pounds and hike for days without fatigue, handle weapons that normally require two people, and whisk the injured off the battlefield by tossing one or two men on his back. They asked for the suit to support more armor, rendering men impervious to enemy fire. They even wanted it to make soldiers jump higher. They wanted Iron Man.

To that end, Sarcos Research Corporation, whose robotics operations were recently acquired by defense giant Raytheon, has created the XOS exoskeleton, whose capabilities you can see in this video:

In Japan, a company called Cyberdyne has developed the Robot Suit HAL-5, which it hopes to put into production later this year. Unlike with the XOS, HAL-5’s user doesn’t have to work controls; sensors pick up signals sent by the user’s brain to his or her muscles, and use them to direct the exoskeleton’ s mechanical limbs. Here’s a YouTube video of HAL-5 in action:

Besides creating a generation of military super-soldiers, powered exoskeletons could have a wide range of useful applications, such as enabling rescue workers to venture safely into burning buildings or toxic disaster sites. A company in Israel has developed an assistive exoskeleton called ReWalk that promises to allow paralyzed people to walk and perform other tasks.

That all sounds wonderful. But as any comics reader knows, powered exoskeletons have the potential to be used for enormous evil as well. A dictator backed by cyborg soldiers, for example, could easily crush any ordinary non-enhanced citizens who dared to oppose him. (Would the Second Amendment apply to Iron Man suits?) And if the technology got into the hands of criminals or terrorists, who knows what awful uses they might find for it? No wonder Tony Stark is such a tormented soul.

So, what do you think about unleashing powered exoskeletons? Express your opinion below.

Should the Pentagon Develop a Telepathic Ray Gun?

I know some of you may not want to believe this, but the U.S. government may well already have the ability to beam secret commands to you through the fillings in your teeth. Well, not exactly. But close.

A recently declassified 1998 U.S. Army report, “Bioeffects of Selected Nonlethal Weapons,” describes government plans for a microwave weapon that would transmit voice communication that seems to emanate from within a human target’s own brain. (It was obtained and posted on the Web by Freedom From Covert Harassment & Surveillance, a Cincinnati-based organization that advocates on behalf of people who believe they are being stalked and subjected to “electromagnetic harassment.”)

To quote the report:

Because the frequency of the sound heard is dependent upon the pulse characteristics of the RF energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person’s head.

This is possible because of something called the Microwave Auditory Effect, which was first discovered during World War II, when people working in the vicinity of radar transponders complained of hearing strange clicking noises that other people nearby didn’t notice. The effect is caused by thermal expansion of the region around the cochlea. In the 1960s, neuroscientist Allan H. Frey, who was the first to publish research on the effect, was able to induce it in human subjects with pulsed microwaves from a transmitter 100 meters away.

It’s unclear just how far the government’s microwave auditory research and development efforts have progressed since 1993, when the report was written. Another sort of microwave weapon described in the report — the Active Denial System, which causes targets to experience an intense burning sensation on their skin without actual injury, has in fact been developed and may be deployed as soon as 2010. According to New Scientist, the first media outlet to disclose the declassified 1993 report, the U.S. Navy in recent years has funded research on a weapon that would use the Microwave Auditory Effect to disperse crowds.

While the 1993 report notes the technology’s potential as a method of transmitting secret messages, it puts more emphasis on how microwave transmission of words could be used as a nonlethal weapon:

It may be useful to provide a disruptive condition to a person not aware of the technology. Not only might it be disruptive to the sense of hearing, but it could be psychologically devastating if one suddenly heard  “voices within one’s head.”

Blasts from the telepathic ray gun essentially would simulate the auditory hallucinations experienced by people suffering from schizophrenia or mood disorders. As this article by Yale University psychiatry professor Ralph Hoffman explains, those illusions can be both excruciating and debilitating:

… Voices produce a stream of speech, often vulgar or derogatory (“You are a fat whore,” “Go to hell”) or a running commentary on one’s most private thoughts.

The compelling aura of reality about these experiences often produces distress and disrupts thought and behavior. The sound of the voice is sometimes that of a family member or someone from one’s past, or is like that of no known person but has distinct and immediately recognizable features (say, a deep, growling voice). Often certain actual external sounds, such as fans or running water, become transformed into perceived speech.

One patient described the recurrence of voices as akin to being “in a constant state of mental rape.” In the worst cases, voices command the listener to undertake destructive acts such as suicide or assault.

Provided that the technology could be developed to the point where transmissions could be beamed over long distances, microwave voice transmissions might be used on the battlefield to fill enemy soldiers’ heads with a disorienting stream of gibberish, or unnerve them with an authoritative-sounding voice telling them to surrender. But the telepathic ray gun might have even more potential for covert operations. Imagine being able to drive North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il into a state of incoherent delirium in front of his generals, weakening his grip on power. Or giving an unwitting Al Qaeda lieutenant mental orders to assassinate Osama bin Laden, in the fashion of The Manchurian Candidate.

Of course, the potential for abusing such a weapon is also immense. We’re talking hypothetical here, but what if a future U.S. president decides that it doesn’t fit the legal definition of torture and authorizes its use to break terrorism suspects? (Come to think of it, microwave telepathy would have been acceptable under the infamous 2002 memo that a Bush administration lawyer wrote to justify legally questionable interrogation methods used in Guantanamo and other, more secretive prisons.) What if the White House, in cahoots with the Pentagon, used it against political opponents of a war it wanted to wage?

So what do you think? Should the military develop a telepathic ray gun? Or, if it turns out that they’ve already developed such a weapon, should it ever be used? Offer your opinion below.