The Cold War has just begun. The next several decades will be defined by an escalating race of espionage and technological one-upsmanship. You owe it to yourself to give your nation every advantage. That includes investigating the shadowy world of ESP and the transmission of messages from one brain to another.

So the tests begin. On animals at first. A hypothesis is formed that two bonds would be universally easy to detect changes in: A) the natural relationship between mother and child B) the continuity of life itself. Logical, no?

Comrades, this is the gilded pathway to hell as you blink to reality and find yourself on a Soviet submarine killing baby rabbits.

The document continues: “According to Naumov, Soviet scientists placed the baby rabbits aboard the submarine. They kept the mother rabbit in a laboratory on shore where they implanted electrodes (EEG?) in her brain. When the submarine was submerged, assistants killed the rabbits one by one. At each precise moment of death, the mother rabbit’s brain produced detectable and recordable reactions.”

Experiments like this when on through the 1970s with a particular focus on documenting if other animals could innately sense one of their own kicking the bucket.

[Mysterious Universe]

A complex mathematical problem known as the Travelling Salesman Problem, and which is known to take a supercomputer days to solve, is effectively being solved by bees in real time. Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway have discovered that bees can quickly determine the shortest route between flowers even when they learn about the flowers in a different order. The problem that the Travelling Salesman must solve is finding the shortest route that allows him to visit all the locations on his route. The current method used by computers to solve it is by comparing the length of all possible routes and choosing the shortest. Scientists hope to study the bees to better manage our own networks while also learning the “minimal neural circuitry required for complex problem solving.”

[Queen Mary via Robots.net]

So Justin Robert Young and I have been scoping out murder scenes, ancient burial grounds and sites of all out massacres in research for our Weird Things Live project (where we investigate paranormal phenomena in front of a live internet audience). On a recent moonlit night standing in the middle of a mass killing field I had an epiphany. What are we going to do when we make contact with some kind of demonic spirit that may have caused people to go on murderous rampages and infect the scene with some kind of contagious inter-dimensional gloom? We need protocols and stuff.

Sure, we’re skeptics and we don’t actually believe in ghosts and spirits, but to be scientific about it, we have to accept the possibility that our premise could be wrong and this stuff is pure concentrated wickedness. We have a moral imperative to do something when we come face to face with wicked evil supernatural forces. So I decided to develop a plan and protocol for capturing and containing all that evil we’re going to encounter for your entertainment pleasure. I’ll describe our method for the capturing process in a later post. Here I’ll describe how we plan to contain it for transport and permanent confinement.

Level 1: Ghosts aren’t real Our first level of protection is based upon the virtual scientific fact that ghosts aren’t real. While we’re confident this should protect us and you, it’s only our first defense.

Level 2: Physical confinement We’re going to use airtight glass jars to physically contain the malevolent spirits. If there is some unknown physical property to dark spirits (like some kind of intelligent airborne bacteria) this should help confine them inside a physical medium.

Level 3: Sacred ground Inside each jar we plan on putting dirt from some kind of sacred holy ground where spirits are able to chill out peacefully. Our plan is that this should contain the spirit long enough to transport it to our final containment area.

Level 4: Sacred seal Using the Egyptians as a guide, we’re going to seal the jar with some kind of inscription designed to keep evil spirits inside. As we know from movies, breaking sacred seals are a bad thing, so we’re going to get some and put them on our jars. So don’t break them.

Level 5: Super Evil Super Max We’ve staked out a couple of remote plots of land located near burial grounds. We plan to bury these jars of tortured souls in this resting spot that will then be festooned with a variety of religious artifacts. We plan on bringing in some kind of Holy Man (under blindfold) to consecrate the grounds. We also plan on creating a ring of powder and pouring holy water everywhere.

That’s just the starting point. Your suggestions are welcome. Our goal is to keep adding to our final resting spot of evil as we capture more spirits. For it to work we’re going to have to keep the actual location a very closely held secret. We don’t want some interlopers to stumble in there and unleash what may be the greatest concentration of evil ever.

If this sounds silly to you, ask yourself this: Would you want these jars filled with the presumed spirits of serial killers and maniacs under your bed at night? When asked if they’d briefly wear a sweater that belonged to a serial killer (dry cleaned no less) most people flat out refuse. I’m sure they’d be even less happy to have our jars buried in their garden.

Check out this creepy full-motion x-ray of a human being speaking. The human being in question is Christine Ericsdotter and she recorded herself speaking to study how the different parts of our mouths work together to make words. You can read more about the study here and watch a full video here (Quicktime required).

Tinkerers from the Site3 coLabratory have discovered how to make fire… with your mind!

The PK4A Project uses a headset to read brain patterns and a small homemade computer to increase or decrease the flame based on the user’s cerebral input.

The headset is called the NeuroSky MindSet and uses four sensors to detect two of the eight energy bands the brain produces. The computer interprets the brainwaves using a custom algorithm and reflects the level of activity with a massive propane flame.

Safety is obviously a concern so the inventors use a ‘dead-man switch,’ which constantly has to be pressed for the device to function.

While there are no plans to put the item up for sale basic specs are available on the project site.

If you can’t wait to see this thing in action, here’s a video of them using it at Firefly 2010.

Six men have sequestered themselves in a Russian Bunker for a 520-day experiment to study how a mission to Mars would effect astronauts.

The experiment will simulate the isolation of space travel and offer limited access to the outside world. Much like an actual space mission the scientists will only be able to communicate with “Mission Control” when they need assistance. Unlike an actual space mission the researchers will also be participating in simulated Inter-planetary chess with chess master Anatoly Karpov.

Participants can end the study at any time by simply walking out, which is a bit of a cop out. If nobody leaves please join us back here in about a year for our follow-up story: “Russian Researchers Bugger, Eat Each Other.”

[NPR]

The crew invents a new form of inter-species prejudice, declares their willingness to do stupid things in the name of science and then goes metaphysical.

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http://itricks.com/upload/WT051410.mp3

Not exactly Men Who Stare At Goats, but here is some recently FOIA’d info about how the Pentagon oversaw experiments into forced narcotics dosing and mind control, all in an effort to get an edge on the godless communists in the Cold War.

Initially funded by the Navy, the project set out to study the effects of brain concussion. Soon after, scientists noted that a blow to the head prompted amnesia, leading to the pursuit of a drug-based technique to “induce brain concussion…without physical trauma.” Shortly thereafter, the project was transferred entirely to the CIA, because it involved “human experiments…not easily justifiable on medical-therapeutic grounds.”

Other programs, described briefly focused on mind-control. MK-NAOMI was after “severely incapacitating and lethal materials… [and] gadgetry for their dissemination,” and MK-CHICKWIT was designed to “identify new drug developments in Europe and Asia,” and then “obtain samples.”

Edgewood Laboratories, where many of the programs were carried out, is also identified as having tested an incapacitating chemical on prisoners and military personnel without the agency’s approval. The drug, EA#3167, was “appl[ied] to the skin” of subjects using an adhesive tape.

Read way more at the Danger Room blog.

[Wired]

I don’t think it too spoiler-y to tell you that Scorsese’s atmosphere-drenched “Shutter Island,” set as it is in a fictional 1950s mental institution staffed and populated by more than a few WWII vets, features several conversations about Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners. I’m sure you’ve heard about these atrocities – high altitude endurance tests, malarial infection research, sterilization projects, poisoned bullet experiments, etc. If you haven’t, turn on the History channel for two hours and you’ll hear about all of it, plus the Spear of Destiny and a computer simulated hypothetical melee fight between Hitler and a velociraptor.

Japan’s less notorious Unit 731, a black ops Imperial Army unit that, from 1937 to 1945, carried out horrific chemical and biological tests on Chinese and Korean prisoners, can offer an equally horrifying research project, if that’s the kind of thing that floats your pickle. What I want to do, though, is take a whirlwind tour of the creepy, grotesque, weird or otherwise cringe-worthy human medical experimentation that has occurred right here on American asphalt.

Due to the graphic nature of some of the experiments mentioned, we are putting the rest of this puppy AFTER THE JUMP…

During the early 19th century, when American medicine was still a loosely regulated syringe-scattered ethical free-for-all, respected medical professionals subjected prisoners, orphans and slaves to all manner of ickiness. J. Marion Sims, for example, who’s known today as the father of gynecology, was known yesterday as the high prince of vaginal hack-and-slash experiments as performed on enslaved African women sans anesthesia. Many of the ladies, some of whom underwent more than two dozen surgical crotch scrambles, died of infection while Sims used cobbling tools to reconfigure their babies’ skull bones (Sims believed trismus, a disorder that prevents infants from properly opening their mouths, could be cured through skull rearrangement). And if you think disenfranchised girlie bits had it bad in the 1800s, wait until you hear about what happened to disenfranchised manly parts in the 1900s…

For 33 years, Dr. Leo Stanley, San Quentin Prison’s chief of surgery, went testicle crazy. Those unfortunate enough to find themselves castrated by Dr. Stanley’s Knives of Sweet Baby Jesus You’ve Got To Be F***ing Kidding had their extracted pride replaced by one of two (well, really two of four) things: the verile cojones of a goat, ram or boar, or the retired balls of an executed prisoner. See, Dr. Stanley thought that the criminal instinct nested in a man’s marble bag, and could be nullified if the marbles in question were replaced by those of a corpse. Dead people nards in live people sacks. He also thought livestock nuts could cure age-related impotence. (They can’t.)

The 1900s saw the continuation of the convict and kiddie medical experimentation trend, as viral and bacterial agents like cholera, plague, beriberi and syphilis were shot into vein after unwilling vein, often just so doctors could observe the full course of an infection in multiple patients in a controlled setting. And when purposely infecting folks began to fall out of vogue, doctors settled for simply not curing the already infected. Such was the basis of the Tuskegee experiment, a 30-year study of syphilis carried out between 1942 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service, who went to rural Alabama, singled out 400 destitute syphilitic African American men and pretended to treat them, all the while observing the unknowing subjects’ gradual physical and mental decline. Under the stoic gaze of government scientists, 128 men died of syphilis or related conditions, 40 women became infected via sexual transmission and 19 children were born with the disease. The secret study only ended because the press found out and had a month’s worth of field days.

Coming up on Wednesday and Friday: Deadly Radiation, CIA Acid Casualties, Nuremberg Defense Lawyers and “the Effect of Frigid Temperatures on Mental Disorders”