[madengr]

RF/Microwave EE here. I actually tried this on myself several years ago with no effect. Specifically 20W at C-band into a 10 dBi standard gain horn a few feet away, pulse mod to 1 kHz. That was still not near enough power density.

While it’s plausible, it would take a big effort to affect this many people. The peak power densities, as described in the paper, would be tens of W/cm^2; e.g. radar transmitters and big antennas.

To direct this power, you’d have to track someone with a high gain antenna, and once you are non line of sight, it would attenuate greatly. That, or you’d have to place covert equipment in close proximity, in many locations.

It would also be very easy to detect with basic test equipment, as the desired peak power levels are huge.

Maybe there could be some organ resonance effect with mmWaves, such as bones in the ear, but that is sketchy too.

Here is the link from the article:

https://braincontrolhedge.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/audito...

[escherplex]

Good commentary but I wonder if inadvertently you may have been out-of-band in your research.

In 'Auditory Response to Pulsed Radiofrequency Energy - Elder (2003)'

URL: http://www.beperkdestraling.org/images/stories/Wetenschap/Ti... Auditory_Response_to_Pulsed_radiofrequency_energy.pdf

Two salient points crop up:

1) 'The fundamental frequency of RF induced sounds is independent of the frequency of the radiowaves but dependent upon head dimensions.'

2) 'RF hearing has been reported at frequencies ranging from 2.4 to 10 000 MHz (see Table 1). Although Ingalls [1967] mentioned 10 000 MHz as an effective frequency, other investigators found that lower frequencies (8900 and 9500 MHz) at very high exposure levels did not induce RF sounds

In Table 2 the experimental frequency range appears to have been 900MHz to 3GHz so C-band at 4 – 8 GHz (7.5 – 3.75 cm) may have be a too short a wavelength to elicit the effect. - but ham radio operators should be worried :-)

[escherplex]

aside: given it's a long link you have to add

Auditory_Response_to_Pulsed_radiofrequency_energy.pdf

to the address

[no_identd]

That... shouldn't break? Let me try:

http://www.beperkdestraling.org/images/stories/Wetenschap/Ti...

Edit: Link seems to work. :)

[madengr]

Ha ha, probably so. It wasn’t research, I was just testing some equipment and figured I try it. It probably works best starting at 1/2 wavelength resonance of the brain, then maybe higher modes where a certain region may be stimulated. Just a hunch.

[themodelplumber]

Great comment. I was also wondering about detection--it ought to be trivial. I'm surprised that government buildings in places like this don't already have simple sensor arrays up and running, especially knowing of the potential for RF use in espionage (information transfer) etc.

[madengr]

Yes, it would be trivial. These kinds of power levels are probably enough to light an LED with it’s leads bent into a dipole.

Pocket spectrum analyzers can be had for cheap these days.

[aswanson]

Why in the world did you try this on yourself?

[madengr]

Curiosity. Why not? It’s not inherently dangerous. I’ve had real RF burns from tuning high power microwave amps.

The RADAR tick is EE folklore, from your brain expanding a few microns at the pulse rate. As I said, takes a huge power density to do this.

Cataracts are an issue with long term exposure. I guess we’ll know in the near future if this group of people has a higher incidence of cataracts.

[subcosmos]

If it weren't for this kind of experimentation, the microwave oven would have never been invented!

[nickysielicki]

Tell me more about your microwave amp RF burns, are you into amateur EME comms?

[madengr]

Ham, yes. EME no (yet). Putting fingers down on 0.5 mm traces carrying 50W at S-band will char your skin. Just tuning amps with golf tees and copper lead frames.

[nickysielicki]

I suppose you work in aerospace and/or DoD? Sounds like you are up to some very fun stuff.

Man, I wish I has the foresight at 18 to study EE instead of going for CS.

[baybal2]

Moreover, that would've certainly affected all unshielded electronics. Even older GSM phones had enough power to some times hang well shielded desktop PCs. And at the time all laptops were plasticky unshielded contraptions, that was even more evident.

[tomjakubowski]

I miss being able to hear incoming calls over my car's stereo before the phone even rang.

[raziel2701]

I can still do that with my cheap computer speakers!

[subcosmos]

In my headphones, when I pause any music that is playing, I can hear data transferring too/from my nvidia GPU while training deep neural networks.

Ive used this technique to get a greater sense of the memory performance.

[maxander]

That's interesting. Certainly, we've all been cued by the sound of our hard disks that something in our code was wrong or that our computer is up to something unexpected; now that disks are getting quieter and/or replaced by SSDs we lose that important "feature." As code-relevant hardware gets more complex (GPUs and other outboard processors, interaction with robotics or media headsets, etc what-have-you) that sort of hardware-level diagnostic should become more useful, rather than less. Has anyone tried to get this to happen on purpose? E.g., little electrical taps on relevant bus cables, with an audio jack.

[sandworm101]

>> It would also be very easy to detect with basic test equipment

Like laptops, cellphones not working. Sparks from coke cans. Chocolate bars melting in pockets. I'd think the fire risk would be too great to attempt this in an uncontrolled public space.

[madengr]

It doesn’t take THAT much power. The paper says effects took an average power of ~1 mW/cm^2, with a 0.0001 duty factor. That’s not much from a heating standpoint, but extremely strong for detectability. That average power is about what your phone delivers to your head.

The peak power is massive, but it doesn’t last long, so the energy is weak. To get the equivalent peak power, you’d have to put 10k phones against your head.

If you put your head in a 1 kW microwave oven, and pulse modulated the magnetron, your could maybe get the effect. It would make an entertaining YouTube video.

[plmpsu]

> If you put your head in a 1 kW microwave oven, and pulse modulated the magnetron, your could maybe get the effect. It would make an entertaining YouTube video.

Sound like an Infinite Jest footnote.

[no_identd]

I'll quote Allan H. Frey, who more-or-less(preceeded by some italian engineers, iirc) invented the entire field, from 1996 on usenet:

>There is a microwave hearing effect that occurs at very low power densities and a skull vibration effect that occurs when very high energies are applied to the head. There is some confusion in the literature because the vibration effect has often been referred to as a microwave hearing effect, but it is not the same phenomena.

And, quoting from a different page:

>In fact, Frey and Hackett said the microwave hearing effect does not occur with millimeter waves (which range from 3 to 300 GHz).

>

>"On the other hand, if your millimeter waves have enough energy density, are powerful enough, there are other phenomena where you could cause sort of a concussion kind of effect which could conceivably be heard by bone conduction. It would transfer through skin to bone and bone into the inner ear," Frey said. He said it might be possible to modulate such energy to create the perception of some intelligible sounds. "But off hand, I can't tell you what kind of power levels you might need to do that," he said. Hackett dismissed the idea of transmitting intelligible sounds to the head with MMWs as pure speculation.

Note how the mythbusters episode where they 'busted' that myth seems like an (unintentional) sham:

They used a 9.4 GHz radar dish (courtesy of the DoD) with ultra short impulses spread out over long periods. That fits NEITHER of the above.

Someone, on, OF FUCKING COURSE, /r/conspiracy, quite a while ago, pointed out something related:

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/77v6t1/reddit_d...

Which points out that the boxspring mattresses used in many Hotels might strongly amplify the ability to induce tissue damage, which would explain this part:

"The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he’d walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room."

From https://www.apnews.com/697536f065e6470eaa5ccfc35061e7ce

Of course, back then, almost everyone dismissed this. Or did they? (Insert dramatic music here)

Here, some more quotes from Allan H. Frey, via http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32648/...:

>For example, after my colleagues and I published in 1975 that exposure to very weak microwave radiation opens the regulatory interface known as the blood brain barrier (bbb), a critical protection for the brain, the Brooks AFB group selected a contractor to supposedly replicate our experiment. For 2 years, this contractor presented data at scientific conferences stating that microwave radiation had no effect on the bbb. After much pressure from the scientific community, he finally revealed that he had not, in fact, replicated our work. We had injected dye into the femoral vein of lab rats after exposure to microwaves and observed the dye in the brain within 5 minutes. The Brooks contractor had stuck a needle into the animals’ bellies and sprayed the dye onto their intestines. Thus it is no surprise that when he looked at the brain 5 minutes later, he did not see any dye; the dye had yet to make it into the circulatory system.

Some more points:

https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.... From 1975 presumably what Frey refers to in the above paragraph, entitled "NEURAL FUNCTION AND BEHAVIOR: DEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP"

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15368378209040347 here, a review from 1982, very much related to the previous quote, entitled "Microwaves and the Blood-Brain Barrier: A Review"

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3109/15368378309040355 and here is a letter correcting that review, sort of. Unfortunately, this letter never got cited in the scientific literature, while the above review did.

For more bibliographical information, one might also wish to examine this email by Allen L. Barker from 2002:

https://archive.fo/V3r0Y (THEORETICALLY also available here, but the domain behind this, http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/, is unreachable from large parts of the internet from what I can tell: http://www.bio.net/mm/neur-sci/2002-May/048366.html)

Of course, EVERYTHING surrounding this (but NOT the subject matter ITSELF) involves a hell of a lot of: * conspiracy theory * fringe science (aka protoscience) * pseudoscience

levels of insanity, as you can likely tell from some of the above. This makes it extremely hard to filter through any of this. The EU did a large report on RF safety a while ago:

https://ec.europa.eu/health/sites/health/files/scientific_co...

If you check it, Frey's papers on this remain oddly absent from it.

Oh and... We could likely find a lot more existing discussion on this, but unfortunately, the emf-bio archives got expunged from ftp://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/usenet/bionet/emf-bio without explanation. If anyone at the University of Indiana wants to go digging into backup tapes, I'd appreciate it.

[jazzyjackson]

I have this notion that surrounding a subject with basket case conspiracy theories would be a good way to get people not to take it seriously :) Of course, there's many feedback loops that allow believers to have their beliefs bolstered by negations.

[no_identd]

>I have this notion that surrounding a subject with basket case conspiracy theories would be a good way to get people not to take it seriously :)

Indeed, it would. A lot of clever people have discussed the issue of disinfo & FUD, you might wish to:

* Watch this talk from FOSDEM '14 by Poul-Henning Kamp [Contextually, one important tidbit to keep in mind while watching it: At the time phk gave the talk, the heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL wasn't yet known!]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk

* and, perhaps, read these two blog posts, but tread carefully with those two, as, unlike the above video, the below edges MOST dangerously close to basket case conspiracy theory territory - arguably, it doesn't get there, but I can definitely say that if one slips while looking into the below, one'll immediately end up in basket case territory:

https://squamuglia.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/67/

https://squamuglia.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/yes-kids-cookie-...

However, having said this & pointed out all of the above, before going down any of the above lanes, keep something else in mind:

1. Take a look at when some of these links got first published online. Multi-decade gap vs. original date of publication. Something unfortunately still the norm for a lot of old(er) scientific/academic literature.

2. Most of Frey's original papers from the 60s are still behind a HARD paywall. Again, unfortunately still the norm for a lot of old(er) scientific/academic literature.

3. The whole classified Radar tech research aspect of it (This whole avenue of research got started out when radar techs in the 60s started complaining about headaches when working in front of big damn radar dishes!)

[delbel]

Curious if you know, what's the low down on 5g? Is it safe? What about rural ares where they can jack up the range? Lots of conspiracy theories floating around there, some vaguely concerned. My cause for concern is zero precautionary principle approach to the technology.

[madengr]

The mmWaves can easily be wave guided into the inner ear, as 1/2 wavelength at 60 GHz is 2.5 mm.

I read a few years ago about electric fields of very high dV/dt being used to temporarily open cell walls. The patients blood was transfused through the apparatus. This was used to enhance chemotherapy, and provided some benefit.

[rleigh]

Electric fields used in this way have long been used in commercial products, e.g. Amaxa nucleofection (https://bioscience.lonza.com/lonza_bs/CH/en/nucleofector-tec...) and Neon electroporation (https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/references/gibco-cel...). I used both a decade back on mammalian cells. Bog standard electroporation has been used far longer back for bacterial cells.

[pgt]

Could higher-frequency harmonics be resonating in cavities acting as waveguides?