Brain Computer Interfaces, Mind Control and Surveillance

Dangers of DNA Tests

Reading Minds and Influencing Human Behavior With Neural Dust

By Robert Sanders


UC Berkeley engineers have built the first dust-sized, wireless sensors that can be implanted in the body, bringing closer the day when a Fitbit-like device could monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time.

Wireless, battery-less implantable sensors could improve brain control of prosthetics, avoiding wires that go through the skull. (UC Berkeley video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally)

Because these batteryless sensors could also be used to stimulate nerves and muscles, the technology also opens the door to “electroceuticals” to treat disorders such as epilepsy or to stimulate the immune system or tamp down inflammation.

The so-called neural dust, which the team implanted in the muscles and peripheral nerves of rats, is unique in that ultrasound is used both to power and read out the measurements. Ultrasound technology is already well-developed for hospital use, and ultrasound vibrations can penetrate nearly anywhere in the body, unlike radio waves, the researchers say.

“I think the long-term prospects for neural dust are not only within nerves and the brain, but much broader,“ said Michel Maharbiz, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and one of the study’s two main authors. “Having access to in-body telemetry has never been possible because there has been no way to put something super tiny super-deep. But now I can take a speck of nothing and park it next to a nerve or organ, your GI tract or a muscle, and read out the data.“

The sensor, 3 millimeters long and 1×1 millimeters in cross section, attached to a nerve fiber in a rat. Once implanted, the batteryless sensor is powered and the data read out by ultrasound. (Ryan Neely photo)

Maharbiz, neuroscientist Jose Carmena, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, and their colleagues will report their findings in the August 3 issue of the journal Neuron.

The sensors, which the researchers have already shrunk to a 1 millimeter cube – about the size of a large grain of sand – contain a piezoelectric crystal that converts ultrasound vibrations from outside the body into electricity to power a tiny, on-board transistor that is in contact with a nerve or muscle fiber. A voltage spike in the fiber alters the circuit and the vibration of the crystal, which changes the echo detected by the ultrasound receiver, typically the same device that generates the vibrations. The slight change, called backscatter, allows them to determine the voltage.

Motes sprinkled thoughout the body

In their experiment, the UC Berkeley team powered up the passive sensors every 100 microseconds with six 540-nanosecond ultrasound pulses, which gave them a continual, real-time readout. They coated the first-generation motes – 3 millimeters long, 1 millimeter high and 4/5 millimeter thick – with surgical-grade epoxy, but they are currently building motes from biocompatible thin films which would potentially last in the body without degradation for a decade or more.

The sensor mote contains a piezoelectric crystal (silver cube) plus a simple electronic circuit that responds to the voltage across two electrodes to alter the backscatter from ultrasound pulses produced by a transducer outside the body. The voltage across the electrodes can be determined by analyzing the ultrasound backscatter.
(Ryan Neely photo)

While the experiments so far have involved the peripheral nervous system and muscles, the neural dust motes could work equally well in the central nervous system and brain to control prosthetics, the researchers say. Today’s implantable electrodes degrade within 1 to 2 years, and all connect to wires that pass through holes in the skull. Wireless sensors – dozens to a hundred – could be sealed in, avoiding infection and unwanted movement of the electrodes.

“The original goal of the neural dust project was to imagine the next generation of brain-machine interfaces, and to make it a viable clinical technology,” said neuroscience graduate student Ryan Neely. “If a paraplegic wants to control a computer or a robotic arm, you would just implant this electrode in the brain and it would last essentially a lifetime.”

In a paper published online in 2013, the researchers estimated that they could shrink the sensors down to a cube 50 microns on a side – about 2 thousandths of an inch, or half the width of a human hair. At that size, the motes could nestle up to just a few nerve axons and continually record their electrical activity.

“The beauty is that now, the sensors are small enough to have a good application in the peripheral nervous system, for bladder control or appetite suppression, for example,“ Carmena said. “The technology is not really there yet to get to the 50-micron target size, which we would need for the brain and central nervous system. Once it’s clinically proven, however, neural dust will just replace wire electrodes. This time, once you close up the brain, you’re done.“

The team is working now to miniaturize the device further, find more biocompatible materials and improve the surface transceiver that sends and receives the ultrasounds, ideally using beam-steering technology to focus the sounds waves on individual motes. They are now building little backpacks for rats to hold the ultrasound transceiver that will record data from implanted motes.

Diagram showing the components of the sensor. The entire device is covered in a biocompatible gel.

They’re also working to expand the motes’ ability to detect non-electrical signals, such as oxygen or hormone levels.

“The vision is to implant these neural dust motes anywhere in the body, and have a patch over the implanted site send ultrasonic waves to wake up and receive necessary information from the motes for the desired therapy you want,” said Dongjin Seo, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer sciences. “Eventually you would use multiple implants and one patch that would ping each implant individually, or all simultaneously.”

Ultrasound vs radio

Maharbiz and Carmena conceived of the idea of neural dust about five years ago, but attempts to power an implantable device and read out the data using radio waves were disappointing. Radio attenuates very quickly with distance in tissue, so communicating with devices deep in the body would be difficult without using potentially damaging high-intensity radiation.

A sensor implanted on a peripheral nerve is powered and interrogated by an ultrasound transducer. The backscatter signal carries information about the voltage across the sensor’s two electrodes. The ‘dust’ mote was pinged every 100 microseconds with six 540-nanosecond ultrasound pulses.

Marharbiz hit on the idea of ultrasound, and in 2013 published a paper with Carmena, Seo and their colleagues describing how such a system might work. “Our first study demonstrated that the fundamental physics of ultrasound allowed for very, very small implants that could record and communicate neural data,” said Maharbiz. He and his students have now created that system.

“Ultrasound is much more efficient when you are targeting devices that are on the millimeter scale or smaller and that are embedded deep in the body,” Seo said. “You can get a lot of power into it and a lot more efficient transfer of energy and communication when using ultrasound as opposed to electromagnetic waves, which has been the go-to method for wirelessly transmitting power to miniature implants”

“Now that you have a reliable, minimally invasive neural pickup in your body, the technology could become the driver for a whole gamut of applications, things that today don’t even exist,“ Carmena said.

Other co-authors of the Neuron paper are graduate student Konlin Shen, undergraduate Utkarsh Singhal and UC Berkeley professors Elad Alon and Jan Rabaey. The work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense.

Human MICROWAVE HEARING EFFECT - Electromagnetics and human biology

 

Former U.S. Representative From Ohio and Candidate for the President of the United States Dennis Kucinich's Attempted Ban of Space-Based Weapons

First off, see here for information on Electronic Warfare.



Dennis Kucinich attempted ban on space-based weapons, read more: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:H.R.2977: 

This new class of weapons is being used on unaware, not informed humans, who of course did not consent to such experimentation. The Nuremberg Code of Conduct for experimentation with human subjects, is part of the Customary Law and the UDHR. The Code lists ten points, which universally have been adopted after the Nuremberg trials of war criminals by the Nuremberg Military Tribunals.

The secret technologies in question are covered by military/agency secrecy orders, mostly obtained under the US Inventions Secrecy Act, 1951. The US Patriot Act, for example, protects governments and connected criminals from criticism and/or detection and prosecution. Under this act anyone whistleblowing or fighting the system on a major concern is arbitrarily deemed to be unpatriotic. They can then be listed (by a senior politician or at the request, through them, of a connected criminal) as a security risk and harassed covertly; using secret technologies. In fact a Department Of Defense Directive, Directive 5240 1-R, 1994, gives open permission for those under surveillance to be used for remote experimentation. It's no coincidence that this particularly undemocratic and evil move was followed in 1996 by a significant increase in the number of satellites deployed for the purpose of civilian surveillance and harassment.

The victims are not openly confronted as that would remove any feigned excuses and leave the perpetrators open to all manner of accusation. Instead, the methods used are covert; employing high-tech methods to remotely torture, torment and deceive victims without leaving evidence. 

The situation is getting worse not better with more and more secretive, undemocratic legislation being sneaked past the unwary public all the time. State treachery and terrorism are behind it yet it is all hidden under the guise of "the war on terror". For example, the US government just passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, giving the President (and others) the power to target and silence anyone questioning State corruption. When this is done openly in other countries the US is the first to condemn such evil. Yet when they are guilty of the same they do it in secret and no-one dares to criticize them, lest they join the ranks of those they persecute. 

Eg. In the USA over 300,000 NSL's (National Security Letters) have already been issued. These allow the agency targeting of innocent civilians whose objections to corruption / crime in high places have been deliberately skewed or misinterpreted as a threat to powerful people. Once placed in a program people can be abused and experimented on, from a distance (using satellites / high tech'). This effectively silences and discredits them while providing agency researchers with guinea pigs for experiments in control, brain function, dreams, health, robotics and much more. Post 9/11, $750 billion per year has been spent on satellite weapons used for human experimentation / targeting. Most of this has found it's way from government coffers to about 80 defense contractors who are also culpable for the crimes against humanity that are addressed on this site.

There is a circular / Catch 22 type problem in that governments use "classified" covers to hide criminal activity (esp. if it is an unconstitutional act) but targets can't prove any of that BECAUSE it has been classified. Executive Order 13526 section 1.7 (covering classified status allocation) specifically says that **"You cannot classify information merely to cover up a crime"**. Even if devices or procedures are classified this also applies to them and information on them when they are being used for criminal purposes. So, in theory, by misusing devices, abusing authority and so on, the administration not only commits crimes but should open up the information relating to that for public scrutiny...(Government of, by and for the people). 

Now Presidents Obama and Bush both signed executive order 13526, so if any of these hidden crimes were to be presented to the US Supreme Court, any current US leader could be impeached as having breached their oath of office...which includes upholding the constitution.

The ECHELON spying system, remote neural monitoring, the use of directed energy weapons and more are all clearly crimes against the people and humanity in general and so by classifying the devices the government and it's leaders are breaching the constitution as well. As with any crime the break in the loop between the acts, investigation, trial and incarceration is the lack of proof. "Classifying" information and calling it a matter of National Security negates the need for the criminals involved to even create excuses for their conduct. The ability of government to classify crime is what must be fought.

Also, the US military is supposed to be prohibited by law from targeting US citizens with PSYOPS within US borders under Executive Order S-1233, DOD directive S-3321.1 and National Security Directive 130. Of course, there's no-one to police that especially since Psyops, by their very nature, are difficult to prove.

This is particularly so where the secret weapons discussed on this blog are employed. Also nothing stops agencies, US or allied, from doing that dirty work and hiding it under the National Security carpet. Nonetheless, public discussion of these Psyops crimes is beginning. 

The International Commitee of the Red Cross (ICRC) raised the issue of psychotronic weapons; firstly in 1994, then the 2002 Geneva Forum and then the 2009 5th Symposium on non-lethal weapons. The EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT passed a "Resolution on the Environment, Security and Foreign Policy" - A4-0005/99, January 28th, 1999 which called for "An international convention introducing a global ban on ALL development and deployment of weapons which might enable any form of manipulation of human beings"..."It is our conviction that this ban can not be implemented without the global pressure of the informed general public on governments. Our major objective is to get across to the general public the real threat which these weapons represent for human rights and democracy and to apply pressure on the governments and the parliaments around the world to enact legislation which would prohibit the use of these devices to both government AND private organizations as well as individuals". (Plenary sessions / European Parliament, 1999). ]

Using Sound Waves to Control Brain Cells Part 2

September 15, 2015, Salk Institute

Salk scientists have developed a new way to selectively activate brain, heart, muscle and other cells using ultrasonic waves. The new technique, dubbed sonogenetics, has some similarities to the burgeoning use of light to activate cells in order to better understand the brain.

This new method—which uses the same type of waves used in medical sonograms—may have advantages over the light-based approach—known as optogenetics—particularly when it comes to adapting the technology to human therapeutics. It was described September 15, 2015 in the journal Nature Communications.

"Light-based techniques are great for some uses and I think we're going to continue to see developments on that front," says Sreekanth Chalasani, an assistant professor in Salk's Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory and senior author of the study. "But this is a new, additional tool to manipulate neurons and other cells in the body."

In optogenetics, researchers add light-sensitive channel proteins to neurons they wish to study. By shining a focused laser on the cells, they can selectively open these channels, either activating or silencing the target neurons. But using an optogenetics approach on cells deep in the brain is difficult: typically, researchers have to perform surgery to implant a fiber optic cable that can reach the cells. Plus, light is scattered by the brain and by other tissues in the body.

Chalasani and his group decided to see if they could develop an approach that instead relied on ultrasound waves for the activation. "In contrast to light, low-frequency ultrasound can travel through the body without any scattering," he says. "This could be a big advantage when you want to stimulate a region deep in the brain without affecting other regions," adds Stuart Ibsen, a postdoctoral fellow in the Chalasani lab and first author of the new work.

Chalasani and his colleagues first showed that, in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, microbubbles of gas outside of the worm were necessary to amplify the low-intensity ultrasound waves. "The microbubbles grow and shrink in tune with the ultrasound pressure waves," Ibsen says. "These oscillations can then propagate noninvasively into the worm."

Next, they found a membrane ion channel, TRP-4, which can respond to these waves. When mechanical deformations from the ultrasound hitting gas bubbles propagate into the worm, they cause TRP-4 channels to open up and activate the cell. Armed with that knowledge, the team tried adding the TRP-4 channel to neurons that don't normally have it. With this approach, they successfully activated neurons that don't usually react to ultrasound.

So far, sonogenetics has only been applied to C. elegans neurons. But TRP-4 could be added to any calcium-sensitive cell type in any organism including humans, Chalasani says. Then, microbubbles could be injected into the bloodstream, and distributed throughout the body—an approach already used in some human imaging techniques. Ultrasound could then noninvasively reach any tissue of interest, including the brain, be amplified by the microbubbles, and activate the cells of interest through TRP-4. And many cells in the human body, he points out, can respond to the influxes of calcium caused by TRP-4.

"The real prize will be to see whether this could work in a mammalian brain," Chalasani says. His group has already begun testing the approach in mice. "When we make the leap into therapies for humans, I think we have a better shot with noninvasive sonogenetics approaches than with optogenetics."

Both optogenetics and sonogenetics approaches, he adds, hold promise in basic research by letting scientists study the effect of cell activation. And they also may be useful in therapeutics through the activation of cells affected by disease. However, for either technique to be used in humans, researchers first need to develop safe ways to deliver the light or ultrasound-sensitive channels to target cells.

Targeting the Brain with Sound Waves Part 1

Ultrasound provides a new, noninvasive way to control brain activity.


by Emily Singer  June 4, 2009


Ultrasound waves, currently used in medicine for prenatal scans and other diagnostic purposes, could one day be used as a noninvasive way to control brain activity. Over the past two years, scientists have begun experimenting with low-frequency, low-intensity ultrasound that can penetrate the skull and activate or silence brain cells. Researchers hope that the technology could provide an alternative to more-invasive techniques, such as deep-brain stimulation (DBS) and vagus nerve stimulation, which are used to treat a growing number of neurological disorders.

“Once people have found out what they can do with DBS and vagus nerve stimulation, we think we can unplug those devices and control activity from outside the body,” says William (Jamie) Tyler, a neuroscientist at Arizona State University, in Tempe. Tyler has started a company called SynSonix to commercialize the technology.

Devices designed to treat brain disorders have grown in popularity in recent years. DBS, which is used to treat Parkinson’s disease, dystonia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, delivers an electrical jolt to the brain via an implanted electrode. Because of its invasive nature, however, DBS is only used for severe cases that are untreatable with medication. A less invasive technique is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in which an electric coil placed over the head generates a magnetic field that passes through the skull and excites neurons in the brain below. TMS is used to treat clinical depression, but it can only target the more superficial parts of the brain.

“With ultrasound, we have a much better spatial focus than [with] DBS,” says Tyler. “And unlike TMS, we can get anywhere in the brain.” Ultrasound–consisting of sound waves with a frequency above 20 kilohertz–has been used for decades in medicine to image muscle, organs, and fetuses. In the past five years, better tools for focusing ultrasound energy have enabled its use as an ablation tool: surgeons can now use high-intensity, high-frequency ultrasound (HIFU) to essentially burn away uterine fibroids. HIFU is also in clinical testing for treating brain tumors, breast tumors, and prostate cancer.

These same tools are now allowing scientists to apply ultrasound to control the brain, an idea that has actually been around for decades. Better ultrasound transducers, which generate the acoustic waves, enable more-precise focusing of ultrasound energy. And magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) used in conjunction with ultrasound allows surgeons to target specific areas of the body more precisely. “The ability to marry focused ultrasound with MR [magnetic resonance] guidance is exceedingly powerful,” says Neal Kassell, a neurosurgeon at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, and chairman of the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation, a nonprofit based in Charlottesville that was founded to develop new applications for focused ultrasound.

One of the challenges in using ultrasound to target the brain is figuring out how to get the sound waves through the skull in a controlled manner. Typically, ultrasound operates in the megahertz to gigahertz range–frequencies that are fine for passing through soft tissue but would liquefy bone. (As bone absorbs the energy of the acoustic wave, it heats up.) Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, have found that an ultrasound frequency of less than one megahertz can do the trick, but with a trade-off: the lower the frequency, the more difficult it is to focus the energy on a particular point in the brain.

In the past year, however, scientists have had some success in solving this trade-off. Detailed images of the skull generated via CT scan and MRI can help scientists calculate the best way to focus the sound waves, says Seung-Schik Yoo, a neuroscientist at Brigham and Women’s and Harvard Medical School. In as yet unpublished work, Yoo and his colleagues have demonstrated that low-frequency, low-intensity ultrasound can successfully suppress visual activity in rabbits’ brains, as well as selectively trigger activity in the motor cortex. “We are also looking at the ability to modulate hormones or neurotransmitters, which may have application for psychiatric disorders, obesity, and addiction,” says Yoo.

In a paper published last year in the journal PLoS ONE, Tyler demonstrated that low-frequency, low-intensity ultrasound can activate channels that sit in the membrane of nerve cells in a slice of brain tissue, triggering the cells to send an electrical message through the neural circuit. He has since been able to use ultrasound to stimulate the motor cortex and trigger movement in live mice. This work has not yet been published.

Researchers hope to co-opt instruments developed for HIFU for this new application. Several instrument companies have developed phased arrays of ultrasound transducers, which allow precise targeting of ultrasound energy, and which are currently being tested for removal of brain tumors. “Depending on individual anatomy of the skull, you can program the ultrasound equipment to fire individual elements to deliver a well-characterized beam, in terms of location and size, that can be tailor-made to each patient,” says Yoo.

Because focused ultrasound is already used extensively, researchers are optimistic that it will not face any major hurdles in moving toward clinical testing. “For neurologists and neurosurgeons, it’s a well-established technique,” says Tyler. “The safety margins are well known.” Adds Kassell, “I think it will actually be easier to get approval [than it was for HIFU] because the pressure of the focused ultrasound is less pressure than the brain gets from transcranial Doppler, a diagnostic device used to look at vessels in the head after stroke and hemorrhage.”

Kassell says that the foundation is most interested in using low-intensity, low-frequency ultrasound for surgical planning. In epilepsy patients, surgeons could use the technology to temporarily silence a piece of brain tissue thought to be responsible for triggering seizures, thus confirming the correct localization, and then use HIFU to ablate that piece of tissue.

Tyler is most interested in using focused ultrasound for treating Parkinson’s disease. “Since it’s not invasive, we might be able to treat patients much earlier in progression,” he says. “Right now, people who get DBS are the worst-case patients.”

While initial devices would likely resemble a smaller version of MRI machines, treating Parkinson’s patients would require a wearable or implantable device capable of delivering continual stimulation. Tyler’s team is working on flexible ultrasound transducers that could be implanted on top of the skull or formulated into a cap.

It’s not yet clear how ultrasound triggers electrical activity in neurons, but some believe that it is through thermal energy generated by sound waves. Tyler, however, says he has evidence that the neurons are activated through mechanical energy. Previous research has indeed shown that the neuron channels that control electrical activity in the brain can be activated with mechanical pressure. “What we think is happening is some kind of microcavitational effect, such as radiation or sheer strain, which affect the channels that control neural activity,” he says.