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The State Department has not provided further details about the medical condition of the affected staffers. But government officials have suggested anonymously that the diplomats may have been assaulted with some sort of sonic weapon.
Experts in acoustics, however, say that's a theory more appropriate to a James Bond movie.
Sound can cause discomfort and even serious harm, and researchers have explored the idea of sonic weaponry for years. But scientists doubt a hidden ultrasound weapon can explain what happened in Cuba.
"I'd say it's fairly implausible," said Jürgen Altmann, a physicist at the Technische Universität Dortmund in Germany and an expert on acoustics.
Once again, the New York Times gets it wrong. James Bond is not the movie genre they're looking for.
mrpg also brings us this less-critical AP report, What Americans Heard in Cuba Attacks: The Sound.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @01:17PM (3 children)
You can levitate things with sound. You can transmit ultrasound across a room, then (via interference with itself and objects) have it turn into normal sound.
So this is totally possible. Cuba does a surprisingly good job of spying on our tech companies and universities, so stealing some interesting tech from us would not be surprising.
Cuba could also be a test site, willing or not, for a country like China or Russia.
Another thing to note is that the sound might be just a side effect. Pulsed RF can interact with objects to make noise. The RF itself would cause plenty of injury.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday October 19 2017, @01:45PM (1 child)
The spectral analysis of the sound itself [newsinc.com] resembles a "porcupine," peaking in amplitude around 7 KHz (which is approximately a musical microtone between A8 and Ab8, the very highest end of some electronic keyboards) it has been suggested to sound like "banging on a bunch of piano keys at once" which is consistent with the fact that those frequency peaks, being spaced so close together, would produce low-frequency beat-frequencies interacting with each other (and producing that "writhing, undulating" description from the victims). It is easy to see how such a sound could be disorienting at high pressure-levels and especially with a focused LRAD-style weapon.
However, as others have already pointed out, the infrasound or ultrasound component hasn't been discussed, neither the potential interactions with objects or biological matter. Brain-waves are in the single and double-digits of Hertz and it is possible that the beat frequencies could be in that range (too lazy to run a time-series or spectral analysis on the actual sound, which is available online -- plus I don't want it rattling the precious few brain-cells I have left).
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday October 19 2017, @04:29PM
I have my doubts that the sound provided is the actual sound, since the first time I heard the story it was referred to as a reconstruction of the sound. I suspect that there's a bunch of weasel words in the provided version that are getting stripped out in the news stories.
Of course, that's not the only possibility. The feds could just be lying. The reported sound could be present as camouflage for some other attack. Etc. But I find the "sonic attack" theory quite difficult to swallow.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday October 20 2017, @12:29AM
It's actually not that far-fetched, the Scots have been using sound as a weapon for centuries.