Miscellaneous

More Americans flee US consulate in China as mysterious sonic sickness linked to Cuba illness spreads

Excerpt:
More US citizens have been evacuated from a US consulate in Guangzhou, China, after suffering what appears to be the same strange, sound-related illness that befell Cuba consulate workers in 2016, it emerged on Wednesday.

Consulate worker Mark Lenzi and his wife heard strange noises over the course of several months before falling ill with what they described as neurological symptoms, The New York Times reported.

On Wednesday night they were flown to the US with their children, including a three-year-old boy who was also affected.

Speaking to The Washington Post that same day, Lenzi described the sound as being like “marbles bouncing and hitting a floor then rolling on an incline with a static sound”. They asked their neighbour if he was responsible, but he denied it. Months later, the couple began to develop excruciating headaches and suffer sleep deprivation – as did their son. Consulate doctors prescribed painkillers and sleeping tablets, they said.

Then, last month, he found out that their neighbour had been evacuated from the consulate, having suffered similar symptoms. Those included “subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure”, the State Department said at the time.
He was checked and diagnosed with a “mild traumatic brain injury”, the State Department said…SNIP

Ladybird beetles swarm on radio tower in South Australia

Excerpt:
Millions of ladybirds are massing under a remote radio tower near Mount Burr in South Australia, with the location also attracting visitors keen to see the unusual sight. Steve Chapple came across the mass and was taken aback by his find. “I’ve always been astounded by the numbers out there but this year was just phenomenal,” he said. “They’re four inches deep and the base of the tower is about five metres by five metres, so you’d have to talk in the millions. “This is the first year that the netballers at Mount Burr have them landing on them and poles during their game. “They’re there all day. “They swarm during the middle of the day and then they land back in the crevasses, the cracks, the pipes during the dark.”..SNIP

Did wi-fi hotspots bring down Russian mail drone?

Someday, in the future, our skies will be full of whirring machines delivering anything we could ever want or need, from medical supplies to pizzas to the latest item from our Amazon overlords.That day is not today.
On Monday, Russia’s postal service tested a delivery drone in the city of Ulan-Ude, Siberia. Instead, though, the drone crashed violently into a wall of nearby building, turning the UAV into a mess of jumbled parts… SNIP

The Mystery of “Sonic Health Attacks” on Havana-Based Diplomats may have been from high-power microwave radiation

Published in Radio Science Bulletin, No. 362 (September 2017) and available online through IEEE Xplore

By James C. Lin, University of Illinois at Chicago

Excerpt:

The Mystery of “Sonic Health Attacks” on Havana-Based Diplomats

For the past few weeks, media outlets have been reporting on the US State Department’s disclosure that Havana- based US diplomats were experiencing health issues [1-5]. Their residences were described to have been targeted with bursts of sound waves….Wait a minute. There actually may be a scientific explanation. It is plausible that the loud buzzing, burst of sound, or acoustic pressure waves may have been covertly delivered using high-power microwave radiation, instead of blasting the subjects with conventional sonic sources. SNIP

A psychological perspective on the Havana “Sonic attack”: Its all just a mass psychogenic illness (Psychology Today)

It’s perhaps inevitable that if you are a psychologist you would tend to be biassed towards considering the strange sonic occurrence at the US Embassy in Havana as a possible psychological problem, especially given that there is no explanation on what really happened. According to New Zealand sociologist and skeptic Robert Bartholomew, writing in Psychology Today (below), a likely explanation is a mass psychogenic illness (MPI). This is essentially mass hysteria or a mass nocebo effect which can tend to be diagnosed when a number of people exhibit strange behavior and those who are making the diagnosis do not know why. So, with no known reason why these 20 or so people in Havana have had these strange symptoms the psychologist’s viewpoint rides to the rescue – ‘Something is affecting these people and as there is no known cause for their affliction, it’s most likely a mass psychogenic illness!’

An all too convenient label to a dismiss any number of environmental health issues, not just whatever is happening in Havana.

“Sonic Weapon Attacks” on U.S. Embassy Don’t Add Up—for Anyone (Scientific American)

HAVANA—Heated charges have flown back and forth for months between the two countries that bracket the Strait of Florida. U.S. State Department officials contended Cuba staged a sonic attack on employees of the American embassy, causing a variety of neurological symptoms. Cuba has not only denied such an attack ever took place but has also emphasized the physical impossibility of a sound wave causing neurological damage trained on such a distant target.

But physicians and scientists from both countries now appear to be in agreement on one critical point: Both sides acknowledge they are baffled as to what happened to 24 embassy employees who were diagnosed with mild traumatic brain damage between November 2016 and August 2017. SNIP

The X Files: Experts Confirm U.S. Diplomats Suffered Concussions From a Still Unknown Source

A report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) confirms the U.S. diplomats who suffered concussion-like symptoms in Cuba did, in fact, have concussions — without ever being hit on the head. This is real X-Files stuff!