Wired News is featuring an extraordinary story by David Hambling today about how the military is investigating a "non-lethal" weapon that makes people feel such intense pain that they run like crazy. Apparently, the weapon would be used in crowd control.
The Active Denial System -- I think I have one of those my own self! -- "produces what experimenters call the 'Goodbye effect,' or 'promptand highly motivated escape behavior.' In human tests, most subjectsreached their pain threshold within 3 seconds, and none of the subjectscould endure more than 5 seconds."
The story has plenty more details, but here's my favorite part: the volunteers who got hit with this thing were unpaid but got a very special bonus: "direct knowledge that an effective nonlethal weapon system could soon be in the inventory."
The military. Such a bunch of givers!
Anyway... If you have questions, drop them in the comments and I'll pass them on to the story author. Look for answers later in Bodyhack.
