Sharon Weinberger
Wired.com
03.07.07
Yesterday’s post on the "vomit beam" (don’t those words just roll off the tongue?) drew some great comments from readers who noted that the idea of a nausea-inducing device is hardly new (although arguably Invocon’s method of achieving the desired vomit effect — through the equivalent of sea-sickness— is rather novel).
In science fiction, there’s the "vomit tube" (or puke grenade) used in the movie Minority Report, which induces people to vomit on demand. But what about real life?
I decided to take a look at weapons the Pentagon has explored that are intended to make you puke, pee, or otherwise lose control of bodily functions. I drew on some old ideas out in the literature, as well as my own past reporting that was just, well, a little too gross to put in any article. Here’s what I found…
Stink Bombs: Sometimes grouped together with "gastrointestinal convulsives," malodorants, as they are formally called, are basically things that smell really, really bad. Nausea can be one effect of malodorants, as anyone who has ever been sensitive to certain smells can attest (car fumes do me in…). The wild and crazy folks at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency apparently continue to do research in this area, which has been around as an idea for several decades. The Sunshine Project has a good background on the subject here.
The Brown Note (aka Resonant Frequencies, or Infrasound Weapons): This concept — sometimes dismissed as an urban legend — is based on the idea that sounds at certain inaudible frequencies may cause people to evacuate their bowels. In fact, famed inventor Nikola Tesla (and arguably the father of all weird weapons ideas) is said to have tested a "brown note" device on his good friend Mark Twain, who immediately ran to the bathroom. Yet the TV show Mythbusters also tested this idea and came up with zilch. As the show’s recap puts it: "They were unable to find a sound frequency capable of making someone ruin a nice pair of pants."
The Gay Bomb: To be fair, this harebrained scheme was never more than a pipe-dream (albeit one the Pentagon mulled, at least for a while). The idea was that some chemical agent would make soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. It wouldn’t really make them gay, but rather make them want to have sex with whoever’s around. Luckily, the Pentagon never pursued this wet dream.
[Incidentally, the idea of sexually stimulating nonlethal weapons came up in a recent article I wrote in the Washington Post Magazine on "mind control weapons"; it seems a number of people believe the government is targeting their genitalia with various types of nonlethal weapons, but that's another story....]
Wired.com
03.07.07
Yesterday’s post on the "vomit beam" (don’t those words just roll off the tongue?) drew some great comments from readers who noted that the idea of a nausea-inducing device is hardly new (although arguably Invocon’s method of achieving the desired vomit effect — through the equivalent of sea-sickness— is rather novel).
In science fiction, there’s the "vomit tube" (or puke grenade) used in the movie Minority Report, which induces people to vomit on demand. But what about real life?
I decided to take a look at weapons the Pentagon has explored that are intended to make you puke, pee, or otherwise lose control of bodily functions. I drew on some old ideas out in the literature, as well as my own past reporting that was just, well, a little too gross to put in any article. Here’s what I found…
Stink Bombs: Sometimes grouped together with "gastrointestinal convulsives," malodorants, as they are formally called, are basically things that smell really, really bad. Nausea can be one effect of malodorants, as anyone who has ever been sensitive to certain smells can attest (car fumes do me in…). The wild and crazy folks at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency apparently continue to do research in this area, which has been around as an idea for several decades. The Sunshine Project has a good background on the subject here.
The Brown Note (aka Resonant Frequencies, or Infrasound Weapons): This concept — sometimes dismissed as an urban legend — is based on the idea that sounds at certain inaudible frequencies may cause people to evacuate their bowels. In fact, famed inventor Nikola Tesla (and arguably the father of all weird weapons ideas) is said to have tested a "brown note" device on his good friend Mark Twain, who immediately ran to the bathroom. Yet the TV show Mythbusters also tested this idea and came up with zilch. As the show’s recap puts it: "They were unable to find a sound frequency capable of making someone ruin a nice pair of pants."
The Gay Bomb: To be fair, this harebrained scheme was never more than a pipe-dream (albeit one the Pentagon mulled, at least for a while). The idea was that some chemical agent would make soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. It wouldn’t really make them gay, but rather make them want to have sex with whoever’s around. Luckily, the Pentagon never pursued this wet dream.
[Incidentally, the idea of sexually stimulating nonlethal weapons came up in a recent article I wrote in the Washington Post Magazine on "mind control weapons"; it seems a number of people believe the government is targeting their genitalia with various types of nonlethal weapons, but that's another story....]
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