experiment anti somn

Why the Horrors of the 'Russian Sleep Experiment' Probably Didn't Happen

This animation investigates the facts behind this pervasive urban myth.

Especially if you haven't been getting a lot of sleep lately, you might wonder just how long you can go on like that. Exactly how long could you stay awake without cracking as a result of sleep deprivation? Some people say there was an over-the-top experiment for that. Experts are quick to debunk it.

The Russian Sleep Experiment is a popular urban myth which began to circulate online in "creepypasta" forums (so-named for the ease with which you could copy-paste spooky content) in the early 2010s. But could this deeply unsettling legend have had some roots in fact?

The story goes that Soviet-era scientists created a stimulant which they believed would enable soldiers to not require sleep for up to 30 days. They decided to test their new gas on five prisoners, promising them their freedom upon completion of the experiment. They locked the five men in a hermetically sealed chamber and began pumping in the gas. Within a few days, the men were exhibiting the kind of paranoia and psychosis that is a typical symptom of sleep deprivation. But as time went on, they began to act even more strangely.

15 days into the experiment, when scientists could no longer see the men through the thick glass of the chamber, or hear them through the microphones, they filled the room with fresh air and unlocked it. There, they discovered that one of the men was dead, and the four surviving test subjects were all sporting horrendously violent injuries, some of which appeared to be self-inflicted.

Attempts to sedate the men were either unsuccessful, or led to their deaths the moment they lost consciousness. Finally, when one of the researchers asked what exactly these men had become, the last surviving test subject told him that they represented the potential for evil that exists in all human beings, which is usually contained by sleep, but had been unleashed by their constant wakefulness. Chilling stuff.

Is any of the Russian Sleep Experiment actually true?

Experts are quick to refute this myth as well. There's no scientific ground proving that gas (or any other substance, for that matter) can keep a person awake for 30 days, says Po-Chang Hsu, MD , an internal medicine physician and medical content expert at SleepingOcean. “Some drugs and high caffeine dosages may grant a couple of days without shut-eye, but 30 is impossible,” he says.

Additionally, this experiment is unlikely because of the effect sleep deprivation has on the brain, Dr. Hsu says.

“Even after a few days, a person can start hallucinating, which would make it extremely hard for them to perform simple daily actions, let alone deal with military assignments that require extreme focus,” he says.

So how long can someone truly stay awake?

The current documented world record for staying awake is a bit longer than 11 days , which was achieved by Randy Gardner in 1963. Gardner experienced severe behavioral and cognitive changes during those 11 days (even though he wanted to prove that nothing bad would happen when a person doesn’t sleep), Dr. Hsu says. He also experienced mood swings, memory issues, severe difficulty focusing, paranoia and hallucinations.

While there is some truth to the claims that amphetamines have been used to keep soldiers alert in historical times of war, there is no scientific evidence of a gas existing that could keep anyone awake for 15 days. And studies have found that after just 48 hours without sleep, people tend to become slower, disoriented, prone to making mistakes, and ultimately less effective as a soldier.

“Since the brain can’t function properly after being sleep-deprived for 11 days, it’s safe to assume things would get much worse if one tries to stay awake longer,” he says. “Consequently, those soldiers would’ve been useless even if they miraculously managed not to sleep for 30 days.”

Still, whoever came up with the story of the Russian sleep experiment in the first place deserves points for their creative writing... if not for medical accuracy.

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Mancarea in Egiptul Antic: Ce mancau egiptenii?

Zeita demeter: cine este ea si care sunt miturile ei, 5 orase celebre fondate de alexandru cel mare, 7 fapte despre viata si domnia fascinanta a lui marcus aurelius, de ce arheologii de obicei isi reingroapa sapaturile, 10 motive puternice pentru a folosi citatele intr-un articol, dragostea: un joc de ucidere sau o sursa de placere, nu avem nevoie de iubire, nu avem nevoie de un iubit, indragostita, uneori trebuie doar sa aduci drama, cele 5 limbaje ale iubirii si cum sa le folositi pentru…, experimentul rusesc al somnului: întregul adevăr.

Experimentul rusesc al somnului este una dintre cele mai faimoase legende urbane, deși puțini știu ce este adevărat în această poveste macabră a Rusiei sovietice. Dincolo de faima sa de creepypasta de pe internet, trecem în revistă istoria unuia dintre cele mai tulburătoare experimente care ar fi putut fi efectuate în numele științei.

• Pentru a afla mai multe: Ce este un creepypasta și cele mai cunoscute 3 exemple.

Experimentul somnului rusesc: Teoria

Potrivit acestei teorii, statul rus a dat voie unui experiment macabru la sfârșitul anilor 1940. Cinci subiecți, prizonieri politici care trădaseră patria-mamă , au fost tratați ca niște cobai umani, undeva îndepărtat în stepa rusă. Obiectivul principal a fost să analizeze modul în care acești captivi ar reacționa la un nou gaz incitant, capabil să-i țină treji o lună întreagă.

Potrivit legendei urbane, mai mulți cercetători, în colaborare cu administrația rusă, au închis cinci subiecți într-o cameră închisă și le-au dat un gaz care i-a ținut treji . În interiorul camerei era destulă mâncare, cărți și o măsuță. Răpitorii puteau să observe subiecții printr-o fereastră și să comunice cu ei prin microfoane.

În primele cinci zile, cercetătorii nu au văzut schimbări vizibile , dar după a cincea zi, totul s-a schimbat. Câțiva dintre captivi au început să manifeste un comportament neregulat, paranoia și să șoptească fără niciun motiv aparent în microfoane.

A noua zi a fost un alt punct de cotitură. Unul dintre ei a început să acționeze violent , alergând prin cameră și țipând fără oprire timp de trei ore, până când corzile lui vocale au spus oprire. Ceilalți patru indivizi l-au ignorat și au continuat să șoptească la microfoane.

Se pare că unul dintre ei a rupt paginile dintr-o carte și le-a lipit de fereastră cu propriile fecale , provocând nedumerirea și dezgustul anchetatorilor. Apoi țipetele și șoaptele au încetat, deși oamenii de știință știau că sunt încă în viață datorită măsurării consumului de oxigen.

În a paisprezecea zi, răpitorii au decis să verifice starea microfoanelor și i-au sfătuit pe subiecți că vor intra și vor înlocui gazul cu aer proaspăt. Surpriza lor a fost enormă când unul dintre ei a răspuns că nu vor să fie eliberați și că trebuie să „stea treji”.

A doua zi, la cererea prizonierilor, mai mulți soldați au intrat în cameră . Spectacolul pe care l-au văzut a fost dantesc. Patru dintre ei erau încă în viață, deși trei le rupseseră pielea de pe abdomen, expunându-le intestinele. De asemenea, au găsit semne că toți patru s-au angajat în autocanibalism.

Legenda urbană sugerează că, după mai multe lupte și atacuri, anchetatorii au ales să-i execute.

Experimentul somnului rusesc: Adevărul

Nu există dovezi documentare că experimentul a fost efectuat, deși dacă ar fi existat, dovezile ar fi putut fi distruse cu mulți ani în urmă. Este foarte probabil ca statul sovietic să fi efectuat experimente de acest gen în scopuri militare (pentru a ține pasul cu rivalii politici ai vremii, precum Statele Unite), dar a spune acest lucru ar fi pură speculație.

Cât despre simptomele lipsei de somn, acestea nu corespund cu cele ale presupusului experiment. Este adevărat că lipsa somnului poate provoca paranoia și halucinații, dar știința spune că moartea are loc între 3 și 4 săptămâni de la începutul privării de somn . Pe de altă parte, insomnia la care se presupune că au fost supuși subiecții experimentului rusesc de somn le-ar reduce capacitatea cognitivă practic la 0.

Ceea ce este greu de crezut este acuratețea cu care se transmite povestea, ceva mai tipic ideologiei colective a internetului. De fapt, povestea a fost publicată pentru prima dată pe 16 august 2010 pe site-ul Creepy Pasta de către utilizatorul Orange Soda. De atunci, articolul a suferit mai multe modificări și revizuiri.

În orice caz, este totuși o poveste terifiantă demnă de cele mai bune producții de la Hollywood. De altfel, există deja câteva adaptări cinematografice, precum scurtmetrajul The Russian Sleep Experiment (Timothy Smith, 2015), pe care îl oferim mai jos integral, sau Depravation , în post-producție.

• Mai multe povestiri: Cele mai bune 7 mituri scurte de groază pentru a fi foarte speriat.

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Un experiment șocant – Află mai multe despre experimentul rusesc anti-somn de după al Doilea Război Mondial!

Unul din subiectele controversate de pe Internet și care a reintrat în colimatorul viralului din lumea virutală este experimentul rusesc al somnului care ar fi avut loc cândva după terminarea celui de-al Doilea Război Mondial. Acest articol povestește experimentul așa cum a fost el menționat în jurnalele cercetătorilor, bucăți din acestea ajungând să fie făcute publice acum câțiva zeci de ani, devenind deja un fel de miraj al tenebrelor rămase în urma războiului. Evenimentele relatate sunt rezultatul a ceea ce au documentat oamenii de știință care au fugit în anii 1940-1950 de serviciul secret rusesc KGB.

Acest articol povestește despre începuturile experimentelor privitoare la tehnologiile de război, cu precădere cele de creare a unui ser sau gaz care să îi facă pe soldați mult mai rezistenți si utili în războaie prin prisma faptului ca aceștia ar putea să rămână treji mult mai mult timp. Se spune ca acest experiment ar fi primul dintr-o serie largă de testări care ar fi dus la crearea gazului Nikolayev, o substanță gazoasă menită să țină soldații treji zile întregi pe câmpurile de bătălie. Astfel, soldații ar fi devenit o armată mult mai puternică; nu ar mai fi fost necesar un număr atât de mare de indivizi pe câmpul de bătălie pentru a învinge oponentul. Gazul a fost numit după un soldat stimat pe nume Felix Nikolayev care a descris într-o oarecare măsură ceea ce veți citi mai jos.

Cercetătorii ruși ar fi ținut în anii 1940 cinci oameni treji timp de 15 zile într-un buncăr sigilat drept experiment al unui stimulant gazos menit a fi folosit în război. Cei cinci cobai au fost închiși, iar nivelul lor de oxigen a fost monitorizat mereu pentru ca gazul să nu îi ucidă, căci era extrem de toxic în concentrații mai mari. Cei cinci erau monitorizați cu ajutorul unor microfoane și prin geamuri groase de sticlă, având în interiorul camerei cărți, locuri de dormit și mâncare uscată care să le ajungă pentru cel puțin o lună de izolare. Nu aveau însă apă curentă sau toaletă și nici paturi propriu-zise pe care să doarmă. Erau cinci prizonieri politici din pușcăriile socialiste ale epocii, cinci criminali de război care au acceptat să participe la experiment pentru ca li s-a promis libertatea la finele acestuia.

Experimentul rusesc al somnului i-a tentat pe cei cinci condamnați politici pentru că aceștia primiseră promisiunea că dacă vor sta treji 30 de zile vor fi eliberați. În primele cinci zile subiecții s-au comportat normal, conversând unii cu ceilalți. Însă din a patra zi conversațiile și evenimentele povestite au devenit din ce în ce mai întunecate și traumatice. După aceste zile cei cinci au început să se plângă de motivele care au dus la prezența lor în cadrul experimentului și au început să dea semne de paranoia severă. Au încetat să mai vorbească unul cu celălalt și au început în schimb să șoptească la microfoane și la oglinda-geam, crezând că pot câștiga încrederea oamenilor de știință de la cârma experimentului de deprivare a somnului prin turnarea camarazilor lor.

Inițial, oamenii de știință au crezut ca acestea sunt efecte secundare ale gazului , însă din ziua a noua lucrurile au început să se schimbe. Unul din ei a început să țipe, alergând haotic prin buncăr; a țipat constant trei ore în șir. După acest timp, prizonierul nu a mai putut țipa, deși a încercat în continuare, rupându-și corzile vocale. În tot acest timp, ceilalți nu au reacționat la schimbarea sa violentă, ba chiar au continuat să șoptească la microfoane, până când și al doilea captiv a început să țipe. Doi subiecți au început să rupă cărți și să le murdărească cu propriile fecale, lipindu-le calmi de geam. Mai apoi țipetele s-au oprit, ca și șoptitul la microfoane.

După alte trei zile în care oamenii de știință nu au mai văzut nimic, au verificat în fiecare oră microfoanele pentru a fi siguri că acestea funcționează, având în vedere că nimeni nu scotea nici un sunet. Indicele oxigenului sugera ca cei cinci sunt în viață, ba chiar că sunt supuși la exercițiu fizic îndelungat. În dimineața zilei a 14-a a testului, oamenii de știință au făcut ceva ce au spus că nu vor face niciodată : au folosit difuzoarele din buncăr pentru a vorbi cu subiecții, spunându-le acestora ca vor deschide camera pentru a verifica microfoanele. Subiecții trebuiau să se întindă pe podea și să stea liniștiți, unul din ei putându-și chiar câștiga libertatea în urma acestei intervenții.

Surpriza sinistră a venit de la răspunsul subiecților, unul din aceștia spunând calm că nu mai vor să fie eliberați

Oamenii de știință și soldații participanți la experiment au început să se îndoiască unii de alții și au decis în cele din urmă să deschidă ușile buncărului la miezul nopții celei de-a 15-a zile. Au scos gazul stimulant din cameră și au împrospătat camera cu aer curat, moment în care obiecțiile celor dinăuntru au început să fie auzite. Trei voci disperate cereau pe ce au mai scump ca gazul să fie repornit , deși camera a fost deschisă iar soldații au fost trimiși înăuntru pentru a scoate subiecții de teste de acolo.

Atât subiecții, cât și soldații au început să țipe , mai ales descoperind că doar patru din cei cinci cobai mai erau în viață, dacă se poate spune așa. Rațiile de mâncare nu mai fuseseră atinse de vreo 10 zile iar bucăți de carne din cadavrul subiectului mort erau îndesate la țeava de scurgere, astfel încât în buncăr erau depuneri de apă de vreo 4 cm înălțime. Nu se știe cât din lichidul de pe jos era apă și cât era sânge.

Cei patru supraviețuitori aveau bucăți de carne și mușchi rupte prin care se vedeau oase, iar din testele ulterioare s-a descoperit ca rănile de pe degetele lor arătau că și-au provocat singuri respectivele daune. Organele de sub coaste ale tuturor subiectilor erau smulse, iar pielea și mușchii de pe coaste erau smulse și ele, lăsând să se vadă cum funcționează inima, plămânii și diafragma. Vasele de sânge și organele erau intacte, însă fusesera scoase și puse pe caldarâm, ținând încă în viață corpurile emaciate ale subiecților. Părea că cei patru supraviețuitori își digerau propria carne pe care o sfâșiaseră de pe ei.

Majoritatea soldaților erau ruși experimentați în tainele și ororile războiului , însă aceștia au refuzat să se întoarcă în buncăr pentru a ridica subiecții după ce i-au văzut. Aceștia din urmă au strigat încontinuu că vor să rămână în cameră și chiar au rugat din toți rărunchii ca gazul anti-somn să fie repornit pentru a nu adormi.

Spre surprinderea tuturor, subiecții de teste au luptat din greu cu soldații când aceștia au încercat să îi scoată din buncăr, un soldat fiind chiar sfâșiat la gât de dinții unui subiect de teste, în timp ce altuia i-au fost rupte testiculele cu dinții. Alți cinci soldați și-au pierdut viața mai târziu, când s-au sinucis la câteva săptămâni după incident.

Unul din subiecții experimentului rusesc al somnului și-a rupt splina încercând să scape din mâinile soldaților și a sângerat imediat, oamenii de știință încercând să îl sedeze folosind de zece ori doza necesară sedării unui om; însă acesta a rămas conștient și alert! Inima i-a bătut timp de două minute și după ce corpul său rămăsese fără sânge, iar după aceea acesta încă a mai țipat și s-a auto-mutilat timp de trei minute. Încerca să atace pe toți cei din jurul lui, țipând încontinuu “Mai mult! Mai mult!” până când a tăcut pentru totdeauna.

Ultimii trei supraviețuitori au fost legati și mutați într-o încăpere medicală unde cei doi care puteau vorbi au rugat constant să fie puși din nou la gaz. Cel mai rănit dintre ei a fost dus într-o cameră unde a fost operat pe viu pentru că sedativele nu au produs nici un efect, acesta încercând să scape din strânsorile puternice. Doar o doză mai mare de anestezic a reușit să îl liniștească, producând instantaneu închiderea ochilor lui și oprirea inimii. La autopsie s-a descoperit că subiectul de teste murise pentru că în sângele său se afla de trei ori mai mult oxigen decât în mod normal, mușchii fuseseră rupți iar nouă oase rupte deveniseră produsul stresului pus de mușchii atrofiați pe ele.

Cel de-al doilea cobai asupra căruia medicii au încercat să lucreze era cel care a început să țipe primul, a vând corzile vocale rupte . Acesta  a reacționat violent, încercând să scape și dând din cap negativ când medicii au adus gazul anestezic lângă el. Când cineva a sugerat ca operația să decurgă fără anestezie, pacientul de ocazie a dat din cap în semn de da. Nu a reacționat în nici un fel în timpul celor șase ore de operație pe viu, uitându-se din când in când cu un rânjet sinistru la asistenta care se afla în operație. Medicii au încercat să îi acopere abdomenul cu ce a mai rămas din piele, punând la loc și intestinele și organele abdominale în tot acest timp, operație din care nimeni nu ar fi putut să iasă viu, cel puțin nu fără anestezie severă.

După ce operația s-a încheiat, pacientul a încercat să spună ceva medicului chirurg scoțând un sunet fad, astfel încât medicul i-a dat un caiet pe care acesta să își scrie dorința. Subiectul de teste nu a scris decât cuvintele “Taie în continuare”.

Ceilalți subiecți de teste au fost operați fără anestezie, injectându-li-se un paralizant pe durata operației. Chirurgii au găsit imposibil să lucreze în condițiile în care subiecții râdeau încontinuu; a trebuit să fie paralizați, doar privind oamenii care operau pe ei. Paralizantul a părăsit sistemul imunitar al subiecților anormal de repede; aceștia chiar au încercat să scape de legăturile de la membre, cerând imediat gazul stimulant anti-somn. Cercetătorii au încercat să îi întrebe de ce au recurs la auto-mutilare, iar răspunsul primit a fost unul sinistru: Trebuie să rămân treaz!

Primele reacții ale oamenilor de știință au fost eutanasierea subiecților , dat fiind faptul că experimentul lor, finanțat de forțele militare sovietice răzbunătoare, a eșuat. Un ofițer comandant a văzut însă o oportunitate de experimentare, dorind să încerce să bage subiecții înapoi în buncăr, unde ar fi fost expuși din nou la gaz, în ciuda protestelor oamenilor de știință. Înainte de a fi băgați în buncăr, subiecții au fost legați strâns de paturi și legați la monitoare EEG, iar în momentul în care cei trei au auzit șoapte cum că vor ajunge înapoi sub influența gazului, au încetat să mai protesteze.

Cei trei subiecți ai experimentului rusesc de somn abia se mai puteau ține treji, unul din ei murmurând încontinuu, în timp ce altul își ținea capul dezlipit de pernă și clipea încontinuu. Subiectul mut încerca să își rezeme picioarele și mâinile de legăturile ce îl țineau strâns pentru a avea ceva de care să se țină treaz. Cobaiul ce își ținea capul departe de pernă fusese primul legat la aparatul EEG astfel încât cercetătorii vedeau ce se întâmplă cu el; deși de obicei creierul îi funcționa consecvent, în anumite momente acesta se oprea, părând că subiectul a intrat în moarte cerebrală. Deodată ochii acestuia s-au închis iar capul i-a atins perna, citirile sugerând că a atins un somn adânc – o comă – după care și inima i s-a oprit.

Singurul cobai care putea vorbi a început să țipe și a cerut să fie băgat în buncărul cu gaz anti-somn, în timp ce citirile creierului său arătau aceleași căderi ca și în cazul subiectului care a murit adormind. Comandantul a dat atunci ordinul pentru închiderea subiecților înăuntrul buncărului cu cei trei cercetători care se aflau atunci cu ei. Unul din cei trei a luat imediat pistolul pe care îl avea la el și l-a împușcat pe comandant între ochi, întorcându-se spre cobaiul mut și împușcându-l și pe acesta.

Apoi cercetătorul și-a îndreptat arma spre ultimul cobai care era încă legat de pat, în timp ce ceilalți oameni aflați în cameră fugiseră. Cercetătorul l-a întrebat pe subiectul său de teste ce este el, primind un zâmbet macabru pe buze și răspunsul următor:

Ai uitat atât de ușor? Noi suntem voi. Noi suntem nebunia care sălăsluiește în voi toți, cerând să fie eliberată în fiecare moment din mintea voastră animalică. Noi suntem ceea ce ascundeți în fiecare noapte. Noi suntem ceea ce voi sedați în paralizie și tăcere când vă aflați în raiul nocturn unde nu vă putem ajunge.

Atunci cercetătorul a țintit inima cobaiului uman și a tras. EEG-ul s-a oprit în timp ce cobaiul a șoptit sfârșit “ atât de aproape liber…”.

Această poveste sinistră, sau experimentul rusesc anti-somn, reprezintă un mini-experiment al unui scriitor pe un site de pe domeniul wikia.com , care și-a încercat norocul în a îi speria pe cititorii în căutare de povești horror. Mulți cred însă că acest experiment a fost unul real, întreaga poveste scoțând un adevărat val de întrebări și teorii virale pe internet. Este sigur să presupunem că un astfel de experiment nu a existat niciodată, deși atrocitățile de dinainte, din timpul și de după război pot fi chiar mai îngrozitoare decât povestea de mai sus. Ce credeți, ar putea fi povestea experimentului deprivării de somn prin folosirea de către ruși a unui gaz sinistru reală?

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Parfumurile toxice din sălile de fitness, un pericol nevăzut ignorat de români

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4 comentarii.

Nu au facut nici un experiment. Este un articol reprodus de pe un site strain unde toata lumea posteaza mici povestiri horror. 🙂

Doamne fereste, auzi, experiment adevarat….. Cei care au intrat pe aici probabil ca nu au auzit termenul de creppypasta (poveste horror) , tot articolul asta este copiat dupa cineva care a scris o poveste horror si a postat-o pe creppypasta wiki, pana si imaginile sunt luate de acolo.Recomand sa dati un search pe Google celor care cred ca toata povestioara asta e adevarata

am vazut documentarul pe discovery parca, asa ca nu e doar o poveste, din pacate…

mie mi se pare si real dar si o minciună!e doar un articol ca să sperie oamenii! ha ha :D! nu cred asta!

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Gus Walz broke the internet with his tearful love for his dad. Then the bullying began

CHICAGO – A tearful, unscripted moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has unleashed a flood of praise and admiration – but also prompted ugly online bullying.

Gus Walz , who has a nonverbal learning disorder as well as anxiety and ADHD, watched excitedly from the front row of Chicago’s United Center and sobbed openly Wednesday night as his father, the Democratic nominee for vice president, delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

The Minnesota governor was recounting the difficult fertility treatment he and his wife, Gwen, went through to conceive their daughter, Hope.

More: Tim Walz's son Gus has a learning disorder. Can his visibility help disabled Americans?

DNC live updates: Kamala Harris to formally accept nomination

Walz followed up by expressing his love for his family from the stage, saying: "Hope, Gus and Gwen, you are my entire world. And I love you."

Gus Walz jumped up from his seat, tears on his face, pointed his index finger and said, “I love you, Dad,” followed soon after with "That's my dad!"

The touching moment between father and son, captured live by television cameras, went viral and has largely been received adoringly on the internet and the airwaves.

Fox News shared a clip of the viral moment on its TikTok page , writing "Gus Walz steals show during dad's acceptance speech." The comments were overwhelmingly positive.

“I hope to inspire my kids so much that when they see me speak of the dreams and passion I have for my country they are moved to tears like Gus Walz was,” Chasten Buttigieg, husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, wrote on X.

“@Tim_Walz has dedicated his life to service and has clearly exceeded in being an excellent, supportive, and loving father every step of the way,” he wrote. “We should all be so lucky to know a love like that.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who spoke before Walz Wednesday night, praised the love between Walz and his children.

More: Who is Gus Walz and what is a non-verbal learning disorder?

“You know you’ve done well as a parent when your kids are as proud of you as Gus and Hope are of Tim Walz,” she wrote on X. “’That’s my dad.’ No three words better describe our next Vice President.”

Actress Mia Farrow added: “Gosh! When young Gus Walz, adorable son of Gwen and Tim Walz, his face streaming tears of pride shouted ‘That’s my dad’ he won my heart.”

Trump supporter and podcaster dismisses Gus Walz as 'puffy beta male'

But the show of affection triggered a swath of snark and ugly comments on social media, many from MAGA supporters of former President Donald Trump, who faces Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Walz in November.

Conservative columnist and right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter mocked the teenager’s tears. “Talk about weird,” she wrote on X. The message has since been deleted.

Mike Crispi, a Trump supporter and podcaster from New Jersey, mocked Walz’s “stupid crying son” on X and added, “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.”

Alec Lace, a Trump supporter who hosts a podcast about fatherhood, took his own swipe at the teenager: “Get that kid a tampon already,” he wrote, an apparent reference to a Minnesota state law that Walz signed as governor in that required schools to provide free menstrual supplies to students.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Jay Weber, a conservative Milwaukee radio host, made a now-deleted post on X criticizing the Walz family.

"If the Walzs (sic) represent today's American man, this country is screwed: 'Meet my son, Gus. He's a blubbering b---- boy. His mother and I are very proud'."

After removing the post, Weber apologized and claimed he didn't know Gus had a learning disability.

USA TODAY reached out to the Walz campaign, which declined to comment.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung released a statement to USA TODAY that said the campaign "is focused on holding Walz and Harris accountable for their dangerously liberal policies that are bad for America." It didn't address the bullying posts.

Trump came under fire in 2015 after he appeared to mock a New York Times reporter with a disability. Critics said Trump's taunts could encourage others to engage in similar behavior.

Posts reflect bullying kids face constantly, advocates say

Advocates for children with learning disabilities were outraged by the venom directed at the Walz family.

“What we're seeing with the bullying of Gus Walz online isn't just cruel – it's a painful reminder of what kids with disabilities face every single day,” said Katy Neas, chief executive officer of The Arc of the United States , a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Children with disabilities are two to three times more likely to be bullied than their peers, Neas said.

“That means our society is teaching countless kids with disabilities that they are somehow less than because of factors outside of their control, including emotional expression and disability,” she said. “What's worse is that bullying can have a direct impact on their academic achievement, which in turn means fewer opportunities as adults. We're failing these kids when we don't understand or value their experiences.”

Research shows that bullying behavior often stems from a combination of factors, such as a desire for social dominance, a lack of empathy, or modeling of aggressive behaviors at home, said Kristen Eccleston, a former special education teacher and advocate for children with social-emotional needs.

“Children with learning disabilities are especially vulnerable because bullies may perceive them as ‘easy targets’ due to their struggles with communication or social skills," said Eccleston, who works for the Weinfeld Education Group, which is based in Bethesda, Maryland, and works with parents to ensure that their children have the supports and services they need.

More: 'That's my dad!': Gus Walz has emotional reaction during Tim Walz's DNC speech

“As parents, it's heartbreaking to see our children suffer from such cruelty,” Eccleston said. “In moments like Gus', where a child is being bullied, it's crucial to surround them with love, validate their emotions, and remind them that the hurtful opinions of others do not determine their worth. Families should use these public experiences to foster open dialogue about emotions, with the goal of helping their child develop strong self-advocacy skills and a healthy sense of self.”

Anne Strober, whose son has autism, said the bullying Gus Walz is facing is despicable.

“For me, it just represents how a lot of people have lost their humanity,” she said. “You have a lot of people, now with social media, who feel very emboldened because they’re behind their keyboards and they can just say what they need to say and with a degree of anonymity. It’s still hurtful whether it’s face to face or it’s online. There’s no place for it.”

Public schools often aren’t able to stop acts of bullying, so parents who fear for their children’s safety often pull them out of school or choose to home-school them, said Strober, who lives in North Potomac, Maryland, and works with parents through the Weinfeld Education Group.

"Children should be off limits to bullying, especially by adults, no matter what political party their parents belong to,” she said. "Gus isn't going to see all of their hateful comments, but other kids will. And it will absolutely hurt them and their families.”

Contributing: Brianne Pfannenstiel , Des Moines Register

The U.S. Navy’s Sturgeon-class Submarine: An Experiment Gone Right

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Sturgeon -class submarines had four 21-inch torpedo tubes and a wide variety of weapons to choose from. Among them were the Mk 48 torpedo, Harpoon anti-ship missile, and eventually the Tomahawk cruise missile. 

The U.S. Navy of the early Cold War went through some radical evolutions. Multiple variations of aircraft carriers were tested. Nuclear-powered submarines became the preferred form of undersea combatant for the U.S. Navy. 

This was a time of extreme experimentation in preparing for the possibility of a total nuclear world war. The Navy had to be prepared to fight and win such a war. 

Enter the Navy’s  Sturgeon -class submarine , a landmark in submarine technology. Indeed, these subs provided the backbone of the undersea fleet for decades. 

Some Background

First developed in the late 1960s as a follow-on to the old  Permit -class submarines , the Navy saw these new boats as offering speed, stealth, and operational range its predecessors never could achieve.  USS Sturgeon (SSN-637)  was first commissioned in 1967. Its primary goal was to counteract the Soviet undersea threat and protect the Navy’s growing fleet of ballistic missile subs. 

Sturgeon -class submarines came with a set of  interesting capabilities . The Navy decided to incorporate anechoic tiles along with sophisticated noise-reducing technologies to enhance the stealth abilities of this boat. These capabilities made the Sturgeon class an excellent platform for covert intelligence operations. 

Generally, Sturgeon -class boats were just shy of 300 feet long, with a beam of about 32 feet. These subs displaced 4,250 tons when submerged. They were made with  HY-80 steel , which withstood greater pressures at depths previously unreached by U.S. Navy submarines.   A single  S5W  or  S5G nuclear reactor  powered the Sturgeon class. With this technology, the submarine technically had unlimited range. The boat could travel faster than 20 knots (or 23 miles per hour) when submerged. 

Such a submarine could transition easily from anti-submarine to anti-surface warfare.

Not only did this class of sub offer enhanced stealth abilities and greater depths at longer ranges, but she came equipped with the  BQQ-5 advanced sonar system . Sailors aboard could trust they had a decisive tactical advantage over any potential enemy underwater, because these subs could hear better and farther underwater than could the acoustic detection of their Soviet Red Navy enemies. Sturgeon -class sonar operators could much more easily detect supposedly quiet Soviet subs operating nearby.

Cultural Impact

The Sturgeon -class submarine left quite a legacy. It formed the basis for most future innovations in U.S. Navy submarine design. 

These boats were significant for training the next generation of submariners as well. The long experience of operating these stealthy boats proved decisive for preparing future submariners for covert undersea warfare.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to the old Sturgeon -class submarine.

Author Experience and Expertise: Brandon J. Weichert

Brandon J. Weichert , a National Interest national security analyst , is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, the Asia Times, and The-Pipeline. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His next book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine, is due October 22 from Encounter Books. Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon .

All images are Creative Commons or Shutterstock.

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The CIA's Appalling Human Experiments With Mind Control

On April 10, 1953, Allen Dulles, the newly appointed director of the CIA , delivered a speech to a gathering of Princeton alumni. Though the event was mundane, global tensions were running high. The Korean War was coming to an end, and earlier that week, The New York Times had published a startling story asserting that American POWs returning from the country may have been “converted” by “Communist brain-washers.”

Some GI’s were confessing to war crimes, like carrying out germ warfare against the Communists–a charge the U.S. categorically denied. Others were reportedly so brainwashed that they had refused to return to the United States at all. As if that weren’t enough, the U.S. was weeks away from secretly sponsoring the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in Iran.

WATCH: Full episodes of America's Book of Secrets online now.

Dulles had just become the first civilian director of an agency growing more powerful by the day, and the speech provided an early glimpse into his priorities for the CIA. “In the past few years we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle for men’s minds–the war of ideologies,” he told the attendees . “I wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in Soviet hands,” he continued. “We might call it, in its new form, ‘brain warfare.’”

Dulles proceeded to describe the “Soviet brain perversion techniques” as effective, but “abhorrent” and “nefarious.” He gestured to the American POWs returning from Korea, shells of the men they once were, parroting the Communist propaganda they had heard cycled for weeks on end. He expressed fears and uncertainty–were they using chemical agents? Hypnosis? Something else entirely? “We in the West,” the CIA Director conceded, “are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare.” This sort of non-consensual experiment, even on one’s enemies, was antithetical to American values, Dulles insisted, as well as antithetical to what should be human values.

Fear of brainwashing and a new breed of “brain warfare” terrified and fascinated the American public throughout the 1950s , spurred both by the words of the CIA and the stories of “brainwashed” G.I.’s returning from China, Korea, and the Soviet Union. Newspaper headlines like “New Evils Seen in Brainwashing” and “Brainwashing vs. Western Psychiatry” offered sensational accounts of new mind-control techniques and technologies that no man could fully resist. The paranoia began to drift into American culture, with books like The Manchurian Candidate and The Naked Lunch playing on themes of unhinged scientists and vast political conspiracies.

The idea of brainwashing also provided many Americans with a compelling, almost comforting, explanation for communism’s swift rise–that Soviets used the tools of brainwashing not just on enemy combatants, but on their own people. Why else would so many countries be embracing such an obviously backward ideology? American freedom of the mind versus Soviet “mind control” became a dividing line as stark as the Iron Curtain.

Three days after his speech decrying Soviet tactics, Dulles approved the beginning of MK-Ultra , a top-secret CIA program for “covert use of biological and chemical materials.” “American values” made for good rhetoric, but Dulles had far grander plans for the agency’s Cold War agenda.

MK-Ultra’s “mind control” experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals. These experiments relied on a range of test subjects: some who freely volunteered, some who volunteered under coercion, and some who had absolutely no idea they were involved in a sweeping defense research program. From mentally-impaired boys at a state school , to American soldiers , to “sexual psychopaths” at a state hospital, MK-Ultra’s programs often preyed on the most vulnerable members of society. The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences.

Whitey Bulger, a former organized crime boss, wrote of his experience as an inmate test subject in MK-Ultra. “Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state,” Bulger said of the 1957 tests at the Atlanta penitentiary where he was serving time. “Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.”

Bulger claimed he had been injected with LSD . Lysergic acid diethylamide, or acid, had become one of the CIA’s key interests for its “brain warfare” program, as the agency theorized it could be useful in interrogations. In the late 1940s, the CIA received reports that the Soviet Union had engaged in “intensive efforts to produce LSD,” and that the Soviets had attempted to purchase the world’s supply of the chemical. One CIA officer described the agency as “literally terrified” of the Soviets’ LSD program, largely because of the lack of knowledge about the drug in the United States. “[This] was the one material that we had ever been able to locate that really had potential fantastic possibilities if used wrongly,” the officer testified.

With the advent of MK-Ultra, the government’s interest in LSD shifted from a defensive to an offensive orientation. Agency officials noted that LSD could be potentially useful in “[gaining] control of bodies whether they were willing or not.” The CIA envisioned applications that ranged from removing people from Europe in the case of a Soviet attack to enabling assassinations of enemy leaders. On November 18, 1953, a group of ten scientists met at a cabin located deep in the forests of Maryland. After extended discussions, the participants agreed that to truly understand the value of the drug, “an unwitting experiment would be desirable.”

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The CIA remained keenly aware of how the public would react to any discovery of MK-Ultra; even if they believed these programs to be essential to national security, they must remain a tightly guarded secret. How would the CIA possibly explain dosing unassuming Americans with LSD? “Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general,” wrote the CIA’s Inspector General in 1957. “The knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its mission.”

Operation Midnight Climax

The CIA’s initial experiments with LSD were fairly simple, if shockingly unethical. The agency generally dosed single targets, finding volunteers when they could, sometimes slipping the drug into the drinks of fellow CIA employees. Over time these LSD experiments grew increasingly elaborate. Perhaps the most notorious of these projects was Operation Midnight Climax.

In 1955, on 225 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, the CIA was devoting substantial attention to decorating a bedroom. George White oversaw the interior renovations. Not much of a decorator, White had a storied career in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. When the CIA moved into drug experiments, bringing White on board became a top priority.

White hung up pictures of French can-can dancers and flowers. He draped lush red bedroom curtains over the windows. He framed a series of Toulouse-Lautrec posters with black silk mats. For a middle-aged drug bureaucrat, each item evoked sex and glamour.

George White wasn’t building a normal bedroom, he was building a trap.

White then hired a Berkeley engineering student to install bugging equipment and a two-way mirror. White sat behind the mirror, martini in hand, and waited for the action to begin. Prostitutes would lure unsuspecting johns to the bedroom, where the men would be dosed with LSD and their actions observed by White from beyond the mirror. As payment for their services the sex workers receive small amounts of cash, as well as a guarantee from White that he’d intercede when the women inevitably had run-ins with law enforcement in the future.

Though the CIA piloted these safe houses as a stage for testing the effects of LSD, White’s interest shifted to another element of his observations: the sex. The San Francisco house became the center of what one writer called “the CIA carnal operations,” as officials began asking new questions about how to work with prostitutes, how they could be trained, and how they would handle state secrets. The agency also analyzed when in the course of a sexual encounter information could best be extracted from a source, eventually concluding that it was immediately after sex.

But perhaps unsurprisingly, much of White’s actions were driven by pure voyeurism: “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun,” White later said . “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?"

The Demise of MK-Ultra

The CIA’s experiments with LSD persisted until 1963 before coming to a fairly anticlimactic end. In the spring of 1963, John Vance, a member of the CIA Inspector General’s staff , learned about the project’s “surreptitious administration to unwitting nonvoluntary human subjects.” Though the MK-Ultra directors tried to convince the CIA’s independent audit board that the research should continue, the Inspector General insisted the agency follow new research ethics guidelines and bring all the programs on non-consenting volunteers to an end.

In 1977, Senator Edward Kennedy oversaw congressional hearings investigating the effects of MK-Ultra. Congress brought in a roster of ex-CIA employees for questioning, interrogating them about who oversaw these programs, how participants were identified, and if any of these programs had been continued. The Hearings turned over a number of disturbing details, particularly about the 1953 suicide of Dr. Frank Olson, an Army scientist who jumped out of a hotel window several days after unwittingly consuming a drink spiked with LSD. Amid growing criminalization of drug users, and just a few years after President Nixon declared drug abuse as “public enemy number one,” the ironies of the U.S.’s troubling experimentation with drugs appeared in sharp relief.

But throughout the hearings, Congress kept hitting roadblocks: CIA staffers claimed they “couldn’t remember” details about many of the human experimentation projects, or even the number of people involved. The obvious next step would be to consult the records, but that presented a small problem: in 1973, amid mounting inquiries, the director of MK-Ultra told workers “it would be a good idea if [the MK-Ultra] files were destroyed.” Citing vague concerns about the privacy and “embarrassment” of participants, the men who crafted MK-Ultra effectively eradicated the paper record for one of the United States’ most obviously illegal undertakings. A program born in secrecy would hold onto many of its secrets forever.

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China's most decorated swimmer back after drugs ban

China's most decorated swimmer has made a winning return to the pool after serving a controversial four-year drugs ban.

Sun Yang won gold in the men's 400m freestyle at China's National Summer Swimming Championships in Hefei on Sunday - and then broke down while speaking to reporters.

He had been previously vilified by many in China as a drugs cheat, but his return was praised across state media.

His win on Sunday comes shortly after a highly publicised anti-doping row at the Paris Olympics this summer, in which China said its athletes were being unfairly targeted.

In a tearful poolside interview with reporters, the 32-year-old thanked those close to him for helping him get back to competing.

“This is really because of the reliance and support from my family -- that's what's kept me going until today," he told the South China Morning Post.

Sun was suspended by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) in 2020 for refusing to provide samples for testers who had visited his home.

In 2012, Sun became China's first male swimmer to win an Olympic gold when he came first in the 400m and 1,500m freestyle races in London. Four years, he followed this up with another gold in the 200m freestyle at the Rio Olympics.

But his career came crashing down when anti-doping officials visited his home in 2018 for an out-of-competition test.

Sun and his team said the testers lacked the proper accreditation and refused to co-operate with them.

According to the testing team, a member of Sun’s entourage smashed a vial of his blood with a hammer to prevent them from departing with the sample.

Sun - who had already been suspended for three months in 2014 for using the banned substance Trimetazidine (TMZ) - denied any wrongdoing and he was initially cleared by swimming's governing body Fina.

Two years later, however, CAS overturned the decision and ruled that Sun had refused to cooperate with the sample testers. He was given an eight-year ban, which was later reduced to four years and three months on appeal.

As he had never technically tested positive for any banned substances, Sun was allowed to keep all of his medals.

His victory on Sunday was widely hailed in Chinese state media outlets, whose posts on social channels were flooded with positive comments.

“Brother Sun, don’t cry. The past four years haven’t been easy. You’re amazing,” said one user on Weibo.

Another said: "Congratulations to Sun Yang. Four years and three months of determination and perseverance have all been worth it and have led to this moment. Looking forward to Los Angeles."

Chinese swimmers have been in the spotlight since the Paris Olympics after a slew of doping allegations, followed by contentious US claims that the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) was covering it up .

Those who headed to Paris were drug-tested twice as much as some other nations, which, in turn, has fuelled accusations of a conspiracy to disrupt their performance.

At the time, the state-run Global Times blamed Western powers for "abusing doping tests to disrupt [the] Chinese swimming team", while breaststroke champion Qin Haiyang accused opposing teams of using underhand "tricks" to disrupt Chinese competitors.

In his long-awaited return, Sun represented his home province of Zhejiang - but it is unclear whether he will be allowed to represent China on the international stage.

According to the country's anti-doping regulations, athletes who have been banned for more than one year are not eligible to be selected for the national team.

Sun insists he will "go all out" to compete for a spot in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles - although his performance will need to drastically improve.

His race on Sunday featured no competitors who swam in the Paris Olympics and his time was nearly nine seconds slower than his previous best, which he clocked in London in 2012.

“I could have done better. Four years away from competition and without intensive training, I do feel rusty in controlling the tempo, and I need more competitions," he told state-run outlet China Daily.

"But it’s a good start for my comeback, and I’m happy with this result,” he added.

Creepypasta Romania

Experimentul rusesc anti-somn

La sfarsitul anilor 1940, cercetătorii ruși au ținut cinci oameni treji timp de cincisprezece zile, folosind un gaz experimental. Au fost păstrați într-un mediu inchis pentru a le monitoriza cu atenție aportul de oxigen, astfel încât gazul să nu-i omoare, fiind toxic în concentrații mari. Camera era aprovizionată cu cărți, paturi pentru a dormi, dar fără așternuturi, apă curentă, toaletă și suficientă mâncare uscată pentru a rezista toti cinci timp de peste o lună.

Subiecții testului erau prizonieri politici considerați dușmani ai statului în timpul Celui De-al Doilea Război Mondial.

Totul a mers bine în primele cinci zile. Conversațiile și activitățile lor erau monitorizate și s-a observat că incepusera să vorbească despre incidente din ce în ce mai traumatice din trecutul lor, iar tonul general al conversațiilor lor luase un aspect mai întunecat după doar patru zile.

După cinci zile, au început să se plângă de circumstanțele și evenimentele care ii condusesera acolo unde se aflau și au început să dezvolte paranoia severă. Au încetat să mai vorbească între ei și au început să șoptească alternativ la microfoane. În mod ciudat, toți păreau să creadă că pot câștiga încrederea experimentatorilor. La început, cercetătorii au suspectat că acesta era un efect al gazului în sine …

După nouă zile, primul dintre ei a început să țipe. A parcurs lungimea camerei țipând în mod repetat timp de trei ore consecutive. Dupa cele trei ore, a continuat să încerce să țipe, dar era capabil să producă doar scârțâituri ocazionale. Cercetătorii au postulat că și-a rupt fizic corzile vocale. Cel mai surprinzător lucru despre acest comportament este modul în care ceilalți captivi au reacționat la el… sau mai bine zis nu au reacționat la el. Au continuat să șoptească la microfoane până când al doilea dintre captivi a început să țipe. Cei trei prizonieri care nu țipau, au desfacut cărțile, au manjit pagină cu pagină cu fecalele lor și le-au lipit calm peste hublourile de sticlă. Urletele s-au oprit.

In urmatoarele trei zile, nemaiauzindu-se nicium sunet, cercetătorii verificau microfoanele la fiecare oră pentru a se asigura că funcționează. În dimineața zilei a 14-a, cercetătorii au făcut ceva ce au spus că nu vor face initial, au folosit interfonul din interiorul camerei, sperând să provoace orice răspuns din partea captivilor si temandu-se ca acestia sa nu fi murit.

Aceștia au anunțat: “Deschidem camera pentru a testa microfoanele; îndepărtati-va de ușă și stati întinsi pe podea sau veti fi împușcati. Conformitatea va va câștiga libertatea imediată.”

Spre surprinderea lor, au auzit o singură frază cu un răspuns calm: „Nu mai vrem să fim eliberați”.

Dezbateri au izbucnit în rândul cercetătorilor și al forțelor militare care finanțau cercetarea. În imposibilitatea de a mai provoca un răspuns folosind interfonul, s-a decis în cele din urmă să se deschidă camera la miezul nopții în ziua a cincisprezecea.

Camera a fost spălată de gazul stimulant și umplută cu aer proaspăt și imediat vocile din microfoane au început să obiecteze. Trei voci diferite au început să implore să se repornească gazul. Soldații au fost trimisi să recupereze subiecții testați. Au început să țipe mai tare ca niciodată, la fel și soldații când au văzut ce era înăuntru. Patru dintre cei cinci subiecți erau încă în viață.

Rațiile alimentare nu mai fusesera atinse din ziua a cincea. Erau bucăți de carne din coapsele și pieptul subiectului mort înfundate în canalul de scurgere din centrul camerei, blocând canalul și lăsând să se acumuleze patru centimetri de apă pe podea. Cei patru subiecți „supraviețuitori” aveau, de asemenea, porțiuni mari de mușchi și piele rupte de pe corp. Distrugerea cărnii de pe vârfurile degetelor si osul expus au indicat faptul că rănile fusesera provocate manual, nu cu dinții, așa cum au crezut inițial cercetătorii. Examinarea mai atentă a poziției și a unghiurilor rănilor a indicat faptul că majoritatea, dacă nu toate, fusesera auto-provocate.

Organele abdominale de sub cutia toracică a tuturor celor patru subiecți fusesera îndepărtate. În timp ce inima, plămânii și diafragma au rămas la locul lor, pielea și majoritatea mușchilor atașați la coaste fusesera smulse, expunând plămânii prin cutia toracică. Toate vasele de sânge și organele ramasesera intacte, tocmai fuseseră scoase și așezate pe podea, în jurul corpurilor eviscerate, dar încă vii, ale subiecților. Se putea observa că tractul digestiv al tuturor celor patru funcționa, digerând mâncare. A devenit repede evident că ceea ce digerau era propria lor carne pe care o smulseseră și o mâncaseră de-a lungul zilelor.

Subiecții testului au luptat acerb în procesul de a fi îndepărtați din cameră. Unul dintre soldați a murit după ce i-a fost rupt gâtul, altul a fost grav rănit, după ce o arteră din picior i-a fost ruptă de catre unul dintre subiecti cu dintii. Alți 5 soldați și-au pierdut viața, dacă îi numărați si pe cei care s-au sinucis în săptămânile următoare incidentului.

În luptă, unul dintre cei patru subiecți vii si-a rupt splina și a sângerat pana la moarte.

Cei trei supraviețuitori au fost reținuți și mutați într-o unitate medicală. Cerșeau continuu gazul care le fusese administrat.

Cel mai rănit dintre cei trei a fost dus în singura sală de operații chirurgicale pe care o avea unitatea. În procesul de pregătire a subiectului pentru a-i pune organele înapoi în corpul său, s-a constatat că era imun la sedativul pe care i l-au dat pentru operație. S-a luptat furios împotriva constrângerilor pana cand inima i s-a oprit. În autopsie s-a constatat că sângele său avea de trei ori nivelul normal de oxigen.

Ceilalți doi subiecți aveau nevoie de aceeasi intervenție chirurgicala. La fel, erau imuni la sedativ, asa ca operatiile s-au desfasurat fara. Pacienții râdeau continuu si cereau din nou gazul stimulant. Repetau obsedant „Trebuie să rămân treaz”.

În pregătirea pentru a fi izolati din nou în cameră, subiecții au fost conectați la un monitor EEG. În timp ce se concentrau pe hârtia care derula din monitorul undelor cerebrale, o asistentă i-a văzut ochii unuia dintre subiecti alunecând în același moment în care capul său a lovit perna. Undele sale cerebrale s-au schimbat imediat în cele ale somnului profund, apoi s-au aplatizat pentru ultima dată când inima i s-a oprit.

Singurul subiect rămas a început să țipe acum să fie izolat.

Initiatorul experimentului își îndreptă arma spre subiectul rămas, încă îngrădit într-un pat, în timp ce ceilalți membri ai echipei medicale și de cercetare fugeau din cameră. “Nu voi fi închis aici cu astfel de lucruri! Nu cu tine!”, a țipat la bărbatul legat de masă. “Ce esti tu?”, a strigat, “Trebuie să știu!”

Subiectul a zâmbit.

“Nu-ti dai seama? Sunt tu. Sunt nebunia care se ascunde în toți, implorând să fiu liber în fiecare moment, strigand din mintea ta cea mai profundă de animal. Sunt ceea ce ascunzi în spatele usilor inchise, în fiecare seară. Sunt ceea ce sedezi spre tăcere și paralizie când te duci în paradisul nocturn unde nu pot călca “.

Cercetătorul a îndreptat spre inima subiectului și a tras. Undele cerebrale de pe monitorul EEG se aplatizau in timp ce subiectul se stingea murmurand…”Aproape liber…”

Poveste adaptata dupa “ The Russian Sleep Experiment “. Povestea este adaptata pe baza licentei CC-BY-SA .

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Phd student accused of killing her friend’s newborn baby could face death penalty if convicted.

A PhD student charged with killing her friend’s newborn baby and injuring his infant twin brother could face the death penalty if she’s convicted of the horrific crime, according to Pennsylvania prosecutors.

The Allegheny District Attorney’s Office revealed in court Friday it plans to seek capital punishment against Nicole Virzi , who allegedly smashed the skull of 6-week-old Leon Katz while she was baby-sitting the tot inside the family’s Pittsburgh-area home in June.

Virzi, 30, was watching the baby after Leon’s parents, Ethan Katz and his wife, Savannah Roberts, took his twin sibling, Ari, to the hospital for injuries that the California woman was later also accused of inflicting.

Prosecutors filed notice that they intend to pursue the death penalty in the June 15 homicide, citing various aggravating factors for the rare step, including allegedly committing the homicide by means of torture, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

Virzi claimed that Leon tumbled from his bouncer chair when she stepped away, but doctors found the injuries “consistent with having been sustained as a result of child abuse, as these are inflicted injuries that are not natural and not accidental,” WTAE previously reported, citing court records and police.

The county’s medical examiner ruled Leon’s cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. A head CT scan showed Leon suffered a severe skull fracture to the left side of the head, along with multiple brain bleeds.

She’s facing charges of homicide, aggravated assault and child endangerment.

Virzi, who was reportedly a clinical psychology student at UC San Diego’s Joint Doctoral Program, was referred to as a “trusted family friend” in a fundraising page established in the aftermath of the death.

While Virzi hails from California, she was staying in a Pittsburgh-area Airbnb at the time of the killing.

Virzi’s attorney, David Shrager, said last month that his client was devastated by Leon’s death while claiming she was innocent.

“If there was something that she would want to convey, it would just be the absolutely horrible pain that she’s feeling,” Shrager said, according to the newspaper. “These were her close friends.”

No woman is currently on death row in Pennsylvania and Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has vowed not to sign off on any death warrant while he’s in office.

Virzi didn’t appear during her formal arraignment Friday and waived a preliminary hearing last month, the Post-Gazette reported.

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The Stubborn Scientist Who Unraveled A Mystery of the Night

Fifty years ago, Eugene Aserinksy discovered rapid eye movement and changed the way we think about sleep and dreaming

Night after night Eugene Aserinsky had been working late. He’d dragged an ancient brain-wave machine, an Offner Dynograph, from the basement to the physiology lab on the second floor of Abbott Hall at the University of Chicago. He had tinkered with it long enough to think it might not be totally unreliable. And now, late one December evening in 1951, his 8-year-old son, Armond, came over to the lab and sat patiently on an Army cot while his father scrubbed his scalp and the skin around his eyes with acetone, taped electrodes to the boy’s head and plugged the leads into a switch box over the bed. From the adjacent room, Aserinsky calibrated the machine, telling Armond to look left, right, up and down. The ink pens jumped in concert with the boy’s eyes. And then it was lights out, the sharp smell of acetone lingering in the darkness.

Armond fell asleep; his father tried not to. Sustained by pretzels and coffee, Aserinsky sat at a desk under the hellish red eyes of a gargoyle-shaped lamp. He was 30 years old, a trim, handsome man of medium height, with black hair, a mustache, blue eyes and the mien of a bullfighter. When he was not in his lab coat, he usually wore a bow tie and a dark suit. He was a graduate student in physiology, and his future was riding on this research. He had nothing but a high school degree to fall back on. His wife, Sylvia, was pregnant with their second child. They lived on campus in a converted Army barracks heated by a kerosene stove. Money was so tight Aserinsky would eventually have to accept a small loan from his dissertation advisor, Nathaniel Kleitman, and then be obliged to feign enthusiasm for the distinguished man’s suggestion that he economize by eating chicken necks.

The hours crept by in the spooky gray-stone gloom of Abbott Hall. While the long banner of graph paper unfurled, Aserinsky noticed that the pens tracking his son’s eye movements—as well as the pens registering brain activity—were swinging back and forth, suggesting Armond was alert and looking around. Aserinsky went in to check on his son, expecting to find him wide awake. But Armond’s eyes were closed; the boy was fast asleep.

What was going on? Yet another problem with the infernal machine? Aserinsky didn’t know what to think, standing in bewildered excitement, on the threshold of a great discovery.

The existence of rapid eye movement (REM) and its correlation with dreaming was announced 50 years ago last month in a brief, little-noted report in the journal Science . The two-page paper is a fine example of the maxim that the eye can see only what the mind knows: for thousands of years the physical clues of REM sleep were baldly visible to anyone who ever gazed at the eyelids of a napping child or studied the twitching paws of a sleeping dog. The association of a certain stage of sleep with dreaming might have been described by any number of observant cave men; in fact, if the 17,000-year-old Lascaux cave painting of a presumably dreaming Cro-Magnon hunter with an erect penis is any indication, maybe it was.

But scientists had long been blinkered by preconceptions about the sleeping brain. It remains an astonishing anachronism in the history of science that Watson and Crick unraveled the structure of DNA before virtually anything was known about the physiological condition in which people spend one-third of their lives. As Tom Roth, the former editor of the journal Sleep , put it: “It’s analogous to going to Mars with a third of the Earth’s surface still unexplored.” The REM state is so important that some scientists have designated it a “third state of being” (after wakefulness and sleep), yet the phenomenon itself remained hidden in plain sight until September 1953, when the experiments conducted in Chicago by Aserinsky were published.

His now-classic paper, coauthored by advisor Kleitman, was less important for what it revealed than what it began. REM opened the terra incognita of the sleeping brain to scientific exploration. Before REM, it was assumed that sleep was a passive state; absent stimulation, the brain simply switched off at night like a desk lamp. After REM, scientists saw that the sleeping brain actually cycled between two distinct electrical and biochemical climates—one characterized by deep, slow-wave sleep, which is sometimes called “quiet sleep” and is now known as non-REM or NREM sleep, and the other characterized by REM sleep, also sometimes called “active” or “paradoxical” sleep. The mind in REM sleep teems with vivid dreams; some brain structures consume oxygen and glucose at rates equal to or higher than in waking. The surprising implication is that the brain, which generates and evidently benefits from sleep, seems to be too busy to get any sleep itself.

The discovery of REM launched a new branch of medicine, leading to the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders that afflict tens of millions of people. It also changed the way we view our dreams and ourselves. It shifted scientists’ focus from the dreaming person to the dreaming brain, and inspired new models in which the chimerical dramas of the night were said to reflect random neural fireworks rather than the hidden intentions of unconscious conflict or the escapades of disembodied souls. By showing that the brain cycles through various neurodynamic phases, the discovery of REM underscored the view that the “self” is not a fixed state but reflects fluctuating brain chemistry and electrical activity. Many researchers continue to hope that REM may yet provide a link between the physical activity of the brain during a dream and the experience of dreaming itself.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Aserinsky’s breakthrough, said Bert States, an emeritus professor of dramatic arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of three books on dreams and dreaming: “The discovery of REM sleep was just about as significant to the study of cognition as the invention of the telescope was to the study of the stars.”

In 1950, when Aserinsky knocked on Nathaniel Kleitman’s office door, Kleitman, then 55, was considered the “father of modern sleep research.” A Russian émigré, he had received a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1923 and joined the faculty two years later. There he set up the world’s first sleep lab. The cot where research subjects slept was pitched under a metal hood formerly used to suck out noxious lab fumes.

At the time, few scientists were interested in the subject. Despite research on the electrical activity of the brain in the late 1920s, the understanding of sleep hadn’t advanced much beyond the ancient Greeks, who viewed Hypnos, the god of sleep, as the brother of Thanatos, the god of death. Sleep was what happened when you turned out the lights and stopped the influx of sensation. Sleep was what the brain lapsed into, not what it actively constructed. On the face of it, dull stuff.

Kleitman was intrigued nonetheless, and began to explore the physiology of the body’s basic rest-activity cycle. A painstaking researcher, he once stayed up 180 hours straight to appraise the effects of sleep deprivation on himself. In 1938, he and fellow researcher Bruce Richardson moved into MammothCave in Kentucky for more than a month to study fluctuations in their body temperatures and other darkness-engendered changes in their normal sleep-wake cycle—pioneering work in the now booming field of circadian rhythm research. Kleitman backed his fieldwork with formidable scholarship. When he published his landmark book Sleep and Wakefulness in 1939, he apologized for being unable to read in any language other than Russian, English, German, French and Italian.

At the office door, Aserinsky found a man with “a grey head, a grey complexion and a grey smock.” As the younger scientist wrote years later, “there was no joy in this initial encounter for either of us. For my part I recognized Kleitman as the most distinguished sleep researcher in the world. Unfortunately sleep was perhaps the least desirable of the scientific areas I wished to pursue.”

Aserinsky had grown up in Brooklyn in a Yiddish- and Russian-speaking household. His mother died when he was 12, and he was left in the care of his father, Boris, a dentist who loved to gamble. Boris often had his son sit in on pinochle hands if the table was a player short. Meals were catch as catch can. Aserinsky’s son, Armond, recalled: “Dad once told me he said to his father, ‘Pop, I’m hungry,’ and his father said, ‘I’m not hungry, how can you be hungry?’ ” Eugene graduated from public high school at the age of 16 and for the next 12 years knocked about in search of his métier. At Brooklyn College, he took courses in social science, Spanish and premedical studies but never received a degree. He enrolled at the University of Maryland dental school only to discover that he hated teeth. He kept the books for an ice company in Baltimore. He served as a social worker in the Maryland state employment office. Though he was legally blind in his right eye, he did a stint in the U.S. Army as a high explosives handler.

By 1949, Aserinsky, married and with a 6-year-old son, was looking to take advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights to launch a science career. He aced the entrance exams at the University of Chicago and, though he lacked an undergraduate degree, persuaded the admissions office to accept him as a graduate student. “My father was courtly, intelligent and intensely driven,” says Armond Aserinsky, 60, now a clinical psychologist in North Wales, Pennsylvania. “He could be extremely charming, and he had a fine scientific mind, but he had all kinds of conflicts with authority. He always wore black suits. I once asked him, ‘Dad, how come you never wear a sports jacket?’ He looked at me and said, ‘I’m not a sport.’ ”

Kleitman’s first idea was to have Aserinsky test a recent claim that the rate of blinking could predict the onset of sleep. But after a number of vexing weeks trying to concoct a way to measure blink rates, Aserinsky confessed his lack of progress. Kleitman proposed that Aserinsky observe infants while they slept and study what their eyelids did. So he sat by cribs for hours but found that it was difficult to differentiate eyelid movements from eyeball movements. Once again he knocked on Kleitman’s door, something he was loath to do because of Kleitman’s austere and formal air. (Ten years after their famous paper was published, Kleitman began a letter to his colleague and coauthor, “Dear Aserinsky.”)

Aserinsky had the idea of studying all eye movements in sleeping infants, and with Kleitman’s approval embarked on a new line of inquiry—one that, he would later confess, was “about as exciting as warm milk.” Significantly, he did not at first “see” REM, which is obvious if you know to look for it. Over months of monotonous observations, he initially discerned a 20-minute period in each infant’s sleep cycle in which there was no eye movement at all, after which the babies usually woke up. He learned to exploit the observation. During such periods, the fatigued researcher was able to nap himself, certain he would not miss any important data. And he was also able to impress mothers hovering near the cribs by telling them when their babies would wake up. “The mothers were invariably amazed at the accuracy of my prediction and equally pleased by my impending departure,” he once wrote.

At home, Aserinsky was under considerable pressure. His daughter, Jill, was born in April 1952. His wife, Sylvia, suffered from bouts of mania and depression. Aserinsky couldn’t even afford the rent on the typewriter he leased to draft his dissertation. “We were so poor my father once stole some potatoes so we would have something to eat,” recalls Jill Buckley, now 51 and a lawyer in Pismo Beach, California, for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “I think he saw himself as a kind of Don Quixote. Ninety percent of what drove him was curiosity—wanting to know. We had a set of Collier’s Encyclopedias, and my father read every volume.”

After studying babies, Aserinsky set out to study sleeping adults. At the time, no scientist had ever made all-night continuous measurements of brain-wave activity. Given the thinking of the era—that sleep was a featureless neurological desert—it was pointless to squander thousands of feet of expensive graph paper making electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. Aserinsky’s decision to do so, combined with his adapting the balky Offner Dynograph machine to register eye movements during sleep, led to the breakthrough.

His son, Armond, liked to hang out at the lab because it meant spending time with his father. “I remember going into the lab for the night,” Armond says. “I knew the machine was harmless. I knew it didn’t read my mind. The set up took a long time. We had to work out some things. It was a long schlep to the bathroom down the hall, so we kept a bottle by the bed.”

Aserinsky did a second nightlong sleep study of Armond with the same results—again the pens traced sharp jerky lines previously associated only with eye movements during wakefulness. As Aserinsky recruited other subjects, he was growing confident that his machine was not fabricating these phenomena, but could it be picking up activity from the nearby muscles of the inner ear? Was it possible the sleeping subjects were waking up but just not opening their eyes?

“In one of the earliest sleep sessions, I went into the sleep chamber and directly observed the eyes through the lids at the time that the sporadic eye movement deflections appeared on the polygraph record,” he would recall in 1996 in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences . “The eyes were moving vigorously but the subject did not respond to my vocalization. There was no doubt whatsoever that the subject was asleep despite the EEG that suggested a waking state.”

By the spring of 1952, a “flabbergasted” Aserinsky was certain he had stumbled onto something new and unknown. “The question was, what was triggering these eye movements. What do they mean?” he recalled in a 1992 interview with the Journal of NIH Research. In the fall of 1952, he began a series of studies with a more reliable EEG machine, running more than 50 sleep sessions on some two dozen subjects. The charts confirmed his initial findings. He thought of calling the phenomena “jerky eye movements,” but decided against it. He didn’t want critics to ridicule his findings by playing off the word “jerk.”

Aserinsky went on to find that heart rates increased an average of 10 percent and respiration went up 20 percent during REM; the phase began a certain amount of time after the onset of sleep; and sleepers could have multiple periods of REM during the night. He linked REM interludes with increased body movement and particular brain waves that appear in waking. Most amazingly, by rousing people from sleep during REM periods, he found that rapid eye movements were correlated with the recall of dreams—with, as he noted in his dissertation, “remarkably vivid visual imagery.”

He later wrote, “The possibility that these eye movements might be associated with dreaming did not arise as a lightning stroke of insight. . . . An association of the eyes with dreaming is deeply ingrained in the unscientific literature and can be categorized as common knowledge. It was Edgar Allan Poe who anthropomorphized the raven, ‘and his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.’ ”

Aserinsky had little patience for Freudian dream theory, but he wondered if the eyes moving during sleep were essentially watching dreams unfold. To test that possibility, he persuaded a blind undergraduate to come into the lab for the night. The young man brought his Seeing Eye dog. “As the hours passed I noticed at one point that the eye channels were a little more active than previously and that conceivably he was in a REM state,” Aserinsky wrote. “It was imperative that I examine his eyes directly while he slept. Very carefully I opened the door to the darkened sleeping chamber so as not to awaken the subject. Suddenly, there was a low menacing growl from near the bed followed by a general commotion which instantaneously reminded me that I had completely forgotten about the dog. By this time the animal took on the proportions of a wolf, and I immediately terminated the session, foreclosing any further exploration along this avenue.” (Other researchers would later confirm that blind people do indeed experience REM.)

In any event, Aserinsky wasn’t much interested in the meaning of dreams, said his daughter Jill, adding: “He was a pure research scientist. It always irritated him when people wanted him to interpret their dreams.”

But a future colleague of Aserinsky’s was intrigued. William Dement was a medical student at Chicago, and in the fall of 1952 Kleitman assigned him to help Aserinsky with his overnight sleep studies. Dement recounted his excitement in his 1999 book, The Promise of Sleep . “Aserinsky told me about what he had been seeing in the sleep lab and then threw in the kicker that really hooked me: ‘Dr. Kleitman and I think these eye movements might be related to dreaming.’ For a student interested in psychiatry, this offhand comment was more stunning than if he had just offered me a winning lottery ticket. It was as if he told me, ‘We found this old map to something called the Fountain of Youth.’ ”

By Aserinsky’s account, Dement ran five overnight sessions for him starting in January 1953. With a camera Kleitman had obtained, Dement and Aserinsky took 16-millimeter movie footage of subjects in REM sleep, one of whom was a young medical student named Faylon Brunemeier, today a retired ophthalmologist living in Northern California. They were paying three dollars a night, he recalled, “and that was a lot to an impecunious medical student.”

Kleitman had barred women as sleep study subjects, fearing the possibility of scandal, but Dement wheedled permission to wire up his sweetheart, a student named Pamela Vickers. The only provision was that Aserinsky had to be on hand to “chaperon” the session. While the sleep-deprived Aserinsky passed out on the lab couch, Dement documented that Vickers, too, experienced REM. Next, Dement says he recruited three other female subjects, including Elaine May, then a student at the University of Chicago. Even if she had not become famous a few years later as part of the comedy team Nichols and May, and had not gone on to write Heaven Can Wait and other movies, she would still have a measure of fame, in the annals of sleep science.

From 1955 to 1957, Dement published studies with Kleitman establishing the correlation between REM sleep and dreaming. Dement went on to help organize the first sleep research society and started the world’s first sleep clinic at Stanford in 1970. With a collaborator, Howard Roffwarg, a psychiatrist now at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Dement showed that even a 7-month-old premature infant experiences REM, suggesting that REM may occur in the womb. Dement’s colony of dogs with narcolepsy—a condition of uncontrollable sleep—shed light on the physiological basis of the disorder, which in people had long been attributed to psychological disturbances. Dement became such an evangelist about the dangers of undiagnosed sleep disorders that he once approached the managers of the rock band R.E.M., seeking to enlist the group for a fundraising concert. The musicians brushed him off with a shaggy story about the acronym standing for retired english majors.

When Aserinsky left the University of Chicago, in 1953, he turned his back on sleep research. He went to the University of Washington in Seattle and for a year studied the effects of electrical currents on salmon. Then he landed a faculty position at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where he explored high-frequency brain waves and studied animal respiration. In 1957, his wife’s depression came to a tragic conclusion; while staying at a mental hospital in Pennsylvania, Sylvia committed suicide. Two years later, Aserinsky married Rita Roseman, a widow, and became stepfather to her young daughter, Iris; the couple remained together until Rita’s death in 1994.

In the early 1960s, Armond Aserinsky urged his father, then in his 40s, to return to the field he had helped start. Aserinsky finally wrote to Kleitman, who had retired from the University of Chicago. Kleitman replied, “It was good to learn that you have renewed work on rapid eye movements during sleep. The literature on the subject is quite extensive now. . . . I believe that you have ability and perseverance but have had . . . personal hard knocks to contend with. Let us hope that things will be better for you in the future.” Kleitman also took the opportunity to remind his former student that he still owed him a hundred dollars.

In March 1963, Aserinsky went home to Brooklyn to attend a meeting of sleep researchers. “People were shocked,” his son recalled. “They looked at him and said, ‘My God, you’re Aserinsky! We thought you were dead!’ ”

Delving into the night again in an unused operating room at the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute in Philadelphia, Aserinsky worked on the physiology of REM and non-REM sleep, but he had prickly encounters with colleagues. He took offense when he did not receive an invitation to a prestigious dinner at a 1972 meeting of sleep researchers. He was often stung when Dement and Kleitman got credit he felt belonged to him. (For his part, Dement said he resented that Aserinsky never acknowledged all the work he did as low man on the lab totem pole. “I was so naive,” he told me.) In 1976, after more than two decades at JeffersonMedicalCollege, Aserinsky was passed over for the chairmanship of the physiology department. He left, becoming chairman of physiology at MarshallUniversity in Huntington, West Virginia. He retired in 1987. “He could be a deeply suspicious and impolitic person,” Armond Aserinsky said.

Narrating his version of events in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences , Aserinsky criticized Dement’s contention that the discovery of REM was a “team effort,” saying, “If anything is characteristic about the REM discovery, it was that there was no teamwork at all. In the first place, Kleitman was reserved, almost reclusive, and had little contact with me. Secondly, I myself am extremely stubborn and have never taken kindly to working with others. This negative virtue carried on throughout my career as evidenced by my resume, which reveals that I was either the sole or senior author in my first thirty publications, encompassing a period of twenty-five years.” That stubbornness spilled into his family relations as well. Years passed in which he had no contact with Armond.

To younger sleep scientists, Aserinsky was only a name on a famous paper, an abstraction from another time. And such he might have remained if not for a license plate and a chance encounter in 1989.

Peter Shiromani, then an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, had just nosed his Datsun 310 into the parking lot of a Target department store in Encinitas, California. His custom license plates advertised what had been his scientific obsession since his undergraduate days at CityCollege in New York City: REM SLEP.

“A woman walked up to me and said, ‘I really love your plates! Did you know my father discovered REM sleep?’ ” Shiromani recalled. “I said, ‘You must be Eugene Aserinsky’s daughter!’ She was very pleased. I think she felt a lot of pride in her father’s accomplishment, and here was someone who recognized her father’s name. We chatted briefly with much enthusiasm about REM sleep. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to ask for her father’s address.”

Shiromani passed the address along to Jerry Siegel, a sleep researcher at UCLA and the Sepulveda Veterans Affairs medical center in suburban Los Angeles, who invited Aserinsky to address the June 1995 meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Nashville. Siegel was organizing a symposium in honor of Kleitman, who had recently turned 100. “It was very difficult to get Aserinsky to come,” Siegel recalls. “People who knew him in the early days said, ‘Don’t invite him.’ But my dealings with him were very pleasant.”

Despite their rivalry, it was Dement who introduced Aserinsky to the crowd of 2,000 people in the ballroom at the OpryLand Hotel. They gave him a standing ovation. And when he finished a witty, wide-ranging talk on the history of REM, the audience again rose to its feet. “It was one of the high points of his life,” recalls his daughter Jill, who had accompanied her father to the meeting along with his stepdaughter, Iris Carter. “He wore a name tag, and people would stop and point and say, ‘There’s Aserinsky!’ ” says Carter.

One July day three years later, Aserinsky, driving down a hill in Carlsbad, California, collided with a tree and was killed. He was 77. An autopsy could not determine the cause of the accident. It’s possible he fell asleep at the wheel.

today it’s well established that normal sleep in human adults includes between four and six REM periods a night. The first starts about 90 minutes after sleep begins; it usually lasts several minutes. Each subsequent REM period is longer. REM sleep is characterized by not only brain-wave activity typical of waking but also a sort of muscle paralysis, which renders one incapable of acting on motor impulses. (Sleepwalking most often occurs during non-REM sleep.) In men and women, blood flow to the genitals is increased. Parts of the brain burn more energy. The heart may beat faster. Adults spend about two hours a night in REM, or 25 percent of their total sleep. Newborns spend 50 percent of their sleep in REM, upwards of eight hours a day, and they are much more active than adults during REM sleep, sighing and smiling and grimacing.

After 50 years, researchers have learned a great deal about what REM isn’t. For example, it was once thought that people prevented from dreaming would become psychotic. That proved not to be the case; patients with injuries to the brainstem, which controls REM, do not go nuts without it. Still, if you deprive a person of REM sleep, they’ll recoup it at the first chance, plunging directly into the REM phase—a phenomenon discovered by Dement and called REM rebound.

Studies of animals have yielded insights into REM, sometimes. In the early 1960s, Michel Jouvet, a giant of sleep research and a neurophysiologist at the University Claude Bernard in Lyon, France, mapped the brain structures that generate REM sleep and produce the attendant muscle paralysis. Jouvet, who coined the term “paradoxical sleep” as a substitute for REM sleep, also discovered that cats with lesions in one part of the brainstem were “disinhibited” and would act out their dreams, as it were, jumping up and arching their backs. (More recently, University of Minnesota researchers have documented a not-dissimilar condition in people; REM sleep behavior disorder, as it’s called, mainly affects men over 50, who kick, punch and otherwise act out aggressive dream scenarios while they sleep. Researchers believe that REM sleep disorder may be a harbinger of Parkinson’s disease in some people.) Paradoxical sleep has been found in almost all mammals tested so far except for some marine mammals, including dolphins. Many bird species appear to have short bursts of paradoxical sleep, but reptiles, at least the few that have been assessed, do not. Jouvet was especially interested in penguins, because they stay awake for long periods during the brooding season. Hoping to learn more about their physiology, he went to great trouble to implant a costly radio-telemetry chip in an emperor penguin in Antarctica. The prize research subject was released into the sea, only to be promptly gobbled up by a killer whale.

In 1975, Harvard’s Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed that many properties of dreams—the vivid imagery, the bizarre events, the difficulty remembering them—could be explained by neurochemical conditions of the brain in REM sleep, including the ebb and flow of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin and acetylcholine. Their theory stunned proponents of the idea that dreams were rooted not in neurochemistry but psychology, and it has been a starting point of dream theorizing for the past 25 years.

The once-popular description of REM as “dream sleep” is now considered an oversimplification, and debate rages over questions of what can be properly claimed about the relation of dreaming to the physiology of REM sleep. (In 2000, an entire volume of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences was devoted to the debate.) To be sure, you can have REM without dreaming, and you can dream without experiencing REM. But most researchers say that dreaming is probably influenced and may be facilitated by REM. Still, dissenters, some of whom adhere to psychoanalytic theory, say that REM and dreaming have little connection with each other, as suggested by clinical evidence that different brain structures control the two phenomena. In the years to come, new approaches may help clarify these disagreements. In a sort of echo of Aserinsky’s first efforts to probe the sleeping brain with EEG, some researchers have used powerful positron brain-scanning technology to focus on parts of the brain activated during REM.

This past June, more than 4,800 people attended the Associated Professional Sleep Societies’ annual meeting in Chicago. The scientists took time out to mark REM’s golden anniversary. With mock solemnity, Dement echoed the Gettysburg Address in his lecture: “Two score and ten years ago Aserinsky and Kleitman brought forth on this continent a new discipline conceived at night and dedicated to the proposition that sleep is equal to waking.”

But to paraphrase the physicist Max Planck, science advances funeral by funeral. Kleitman died in 1999 at the age of 104, and though he was a coauthor of the milestone REM study, he never really accepted that REM was anything other than a phase of especially shallow sleep. “Kleitman died still believing there was only one state of sleep,” Dement told me. Aserinsky had his own blind spots; he never relinquished his doubts that sleeping infants exhibit REM.

To honor the research done in Kleitman’s lab five decades ago, the Sleep Research Society commissioned a 65-pound zinc plaque. It now hangs in the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago Medical Center, adjacent to Abbott Hall. To be sure, the inscription—“Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Discovery of REMSleep by Eugene Aserinsky, Ph.D., and Nathaniel Kleitman, Ph.D., at the University of Chicago”—doesn’t speak to the poetry of a lyric moment in the history of science, a moment when, as Michel Jouvet once said, humanity came upon “a new continent in the brain.” But then, what do you expect from a plaque? If it’s the poetry of REM you want, you need wait only until tonight.

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12 Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Monday, August 26, 2024

Trey parker and matt stone’s surprise nyu class contains some great writing advice, 38 of the funniest tweets from monday, august 26, 2024, ted danson may have broken a tv record with his latest sitcom, this season of ‘the simpsons’ has the best animation, according to superfans, the 6 cruelest science experiments ever (were done on kids).

Sometimes science has to be ruthless. If curing cancer means dropping a dozen frightened children into the jungle for some reason, then by God that's what you do. And if you aren't curing cancer, but are just curious about what children look like when abandoned in a jungle, well, you still do it. Why? Because science .

Think we're joking? Hold on to your butts, because all of the following experiments really happened.

6 Put Kids in the Wilderness, Make Them Go to War

In the summer of 1954, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif wanted to see if two groups stuck in the wild would learn to hate each other. What else was there to do but try it?

Thus kicked off his Robbers Cave experiment , in which a group of 11 ordinary, middle-class 11-year-old boys headed to summer camp at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma, anxious for three fun-filled weeks of hiking, fishing and swimming. They were completely unaware that their parents had signed them up for Sherif's experiment, and that there was a second group of campers elsewhere on the site that they would be trained to hate.

For the first week, the groups were kept apart and encouraged to participate in separate team-building events and activities, in order to form relationships within each group. They established their own hierarchy and elected leaders, and gave their groups names -- the Eagles and the Rattlers, because it was the 1950s. Each group even designed flags to represent themselves. Then, once each group had formed a close-knit bond, the Eagles and the Rattlers conveniently "discovered" each other, and both sides approached the situation with about as much grace and understanding as David Duke running a three-legged race with Tyler Perry.

To see how much conflict they could instigate between the two groups, the experimenters arranged a tournament with events like baseball and tug-of-war, promising shiny trophies and pocket knives to the winners, because as we all know, the one prize you should always award a warring band of feral children is a knife. With a little creative prodding, what started with boos and insults quickly escalated into a full-out battle, ending with the Eagles burning the Rattlers' flag after being defeated at tug-of-war.

As the tournament waged on, fistfights had to be constantly broken up, and any time the two groups had to eat together, the mess hall would erupt into Road House . Finally, the Eagles won the tournament and were given the coveted prizes, only to have the Rattlers ransack their cabin and steal the bejeezus out of them . Yep, Sherif and his team had successfully transformed 22 ordinary 11-year-old boys with no previous behavioral problems into a mob of aggressive savages.

It took less than three weeks.

Hey, did we mention that Robbers Cave was actually the third time Sherif had run the same experiment , and some sort of violence had inevitably exploded by the end of each trial? And that in one instance, the boys turned on Sherif and his team?

5 Programming Kids for Violence, Then Turning Them Loose on a Clown

In the early '60s, a psychologist named Albert Bandura wanted to investigate whether children would imitate aggressive behavior without encouragement or active suggestion. So he took a Bobo Doll (the original version of those inflatable bop bags you probably had as a kid) and filmed a video of an adult punching, kicking and beating the doll with hammers, because if you're going to hit a clown with something, there's no point in fucking around. Then he showed the video to a group of 24 young children. A second group was given a nonviolent video, and a third control group was given no video at all.

All three groups were unleashed one at a time into a room with a Bobo Doll, some hammers and even some toy guns, though no guns were featured in either video. As seen in this clip , the kids who were shown the aggressive video wasted no time in showing Bobo exactly what they thought of his inflatable whimsy.

The white kid in the beginning even seems to be creepily whispering things to the doll at gunpoint:

The children in the other two groups didn't demonstrate anywhere near as much aggression. However, Bandura's critics argued that you couldn't put children in a room with a toy that's essentially a punching bag and then claim to be proving anything when they hit it -- the Bobo Doll is designed to be smacked around, that's the whole point of its existence. So, Bandura gathered up more children from the infinite supply of them that these scientists seem to have access to and showed them a video of an adult punching, kicking and hammering a real live clown (this was presumably an old Super 8 film he found in his grandfather's attic, along with various antique torture equipment).

After watching the video, Bandura turned the kids loose into a room with ... a real live clown. Sure enough, the children happily assaulted the man with punches, kicks and hammer blows, proving not only that kids imitate aggression, but that they have the same grasp of consequences as a death row inmate with his shoelaces and utensils revoked. And that they won't pass up a chance to rough up a clown.

4 The Broken Toy Experiment

Psychologists at the University of Iowa wanted to gain a better understanding of how preschoolers and toddlers experience guilt, because it's never too early to get started on that. So, they devised the broken toy experiment , which is exactly what it sounds like.

The experiment was simple. An adult would show a toy to a young child. The adult would go on to explain that the toy was something very special, a sentimental item they'd had since they were very little. Then, asking the child to be very careful with it, the adult would hand over the toy. You know where this is going: The toy was rigged to "break spectacularly" as soon as the kid messed with it, presumably vaporizing in a two-inch fireball after a mild explosion.

The adult then simply said, "Oh, my," and would sit staring at the child for a full minute.

Picture it, just sitting there in total silence, watching mutely as the children "squirmed, avoided the experimenter's gaze, hunched their shoulders, hugged themselves and covered their faces with their hands." This part of the experiment was presumably designed to teach the children the concept of time dilation -- that is, how their guilt made it the longest goddamn minute they had so far experienced in their short lives.

Interestingly, the kids who seemed most traumatized by the broken toy experiment went on to have the least behavioral problems over the next five years -- though whether this was due to the fact that they'd developed a healthy guilt response or that they'd learned early on that adults are fucking lunatics is impossible to determine.

3 Tempting Babies to Crawl Off a Cliff

Once babies reach crawling age, they tend to not crawl straight off the edge of things when the fall is great enough to result in potential injury. But why is that? How do they know what a fatal drop is if they've never experienced one? Clearly the only way to study the phenomenon was to observe some infants as they encountered a remorseless abyss, then try to convince them to crawl off of it.

And so, in 1960, two psychologists at Cornell University named Eleanor J. Gibson and Richard D. Walk proceeded to build what they dubbed the "visual cliff" -- a contraption made up of boards laid across a heavy sheet of glass. When some patterned fabric was added, the resulting effect was that the transition from boards to bare glass looked like a sheer drop straight to the floor below. Well, that's not so bad -- there was no real danger to the babies, right?

Well, not physical danger, anyway. One at a time, they plopped a bunch of babies on the "cliff" and had their mothers try to coax them across the glass. In other words, they had the mothers tell their own babies to do something that the babies believed was certain death, and the babies then had to choose between obedience and their own self-preservation.

They tested 36 infants ranging from 6 to 14 months old (you can see the video here ), and of those 36, only three crept over the "cliff" and onto the glass (those three presumably did not grow up to become scientists themselves). Most of them crawled away from their mothers, presumably instilling a mistrust that plagued them for the rest of their lives. Others cried, probably because they lacked the language to fill the air with confused, wounded obscenities.

However, Gibson and Walk did notice that several of the infants who didn't cross onto the glass still got close enough to the edge to fall, had the drop been real. This led them to the following conclusion: "Evidently infants should not be left close to a brink, no matter how well they may discriminate depth." So, babies should be kept away from long drops. Thanks, science!

2 Using Orphans as Practice Babies

Back in the days when young women were only expected to go to school to learn how to roast a chicken in between pregnancies, domestic economy (or home economics) was a thriving program at institutions like Cornell, the University of Minnesota and Eastern Illinois State. And these institutions figured that there was no better way to test out the latest child-rearing theories of the day than on actual living babies .

Starting around 1920, these colleges and others "borrowed" hundreds of babies from orphanages for young female students to practice on. The babies stayed in practice apartments, where they were cared for by revolving groups of eight to 12 female students, a process we are convinced would lead a developing infant to believe that its mother was a shape-shifting demon.

The babies' real identities were kept secret, so the girls took to giving them names like Denny Domecon (for domestic economy), as detailed in this Cornell publication that literally contains the sentence "Each of Cornell's two practice apartments is equipped with a real baby." After a year or two of serving as the doll in this real-life dollhouse, the babies would go on to homes in adoptive families, presumably frustrated over downgrading to just a personal assistant after having an entire staff.

In their defense, the Illinois State Child Welfare Division tried to shut down Eastern Illinois State's practice-babies program in the mid-1950s to protect a child known as "David North," who at the time was being raised by 12 different student mothers. Ultimately it was decided that the state had no jurisdiction, since David's real mother had given consent, and programs like this continued on up until the 1960s, when people finally realized that the only practice baby you should really get is your own.

1 Turning a Ruined Penis into a Lifelong Experiment

David Reimer was born in Winnipeg in 1965, one of a set of identical twin boys. When David was 8 months old, his parents took him to the doctor to get circumcised. Unfortunately, rather than using a scalpel like a medical professional, the doctor decided to use an electrocautery needle, presumably because one of his nightmares dared him to. If you're not familiar with that device or what it does, let us just put it like this: During the procedure, the doctor accidentally burned off David's entire penis.

Understandably distraught, David's parents went to psychologist Dr. John Money, an expert in the field of sexual identity studies, for advice. Dr. Money made the radical recommendation of performing a sex change operation and raising David as a girl.

David's parents accepted his advice, truly wanting to do what was best in the wake of their son's tragedy and give him the best life they could. However, Dr. Money wasn't terribly interested in David's quality of life ("wasn't terribly interested" is a phrase that here means "He didn't give one volcanic shit"). Dr. Money suggested the sex change because he saw the situation as the perfect opportunity to perform the ultimate experiment to "prove that nurture, not nature, determines gender identity and sexual orientation." And the fact that David had a twin brother to use as a control group was just the icing on the douchecake.

The problem was, David never accepted his role as "Brenda." She rebelled against wearing dresses and preferred her brother's toy cars and guns to her own dolls (to be fair, many girls do, because cars and guns are badass). She was relentlessly teased at school for talking and acting like a boy. Brenda/David's (Brendavid's?) parents went to Dr. Money for help, but he insisted that the child was just "going through a phase," and that everything would be totally fine. Meanwhile, Money was continuously publishing papers about the experiment and labeling it a complete success, which suggests that at no point in medical school was he called on to open a dictionary to the "S" section.

But Money mysteriously stopped publishing glowing reports on his experiment in the late '70s -- right around the time David found out the truth about his penis being melted off by a space wand. A few decades quietly passed, and then in 1997 the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine released a detailed follow-up on Dr. Money's experiments, illustrating the catastrophic damage he had caused to poor, tragic David and creating a media uproar criticizing his actions.

Money was reportedly " mortified " by the case and refused to talk about it, although whether he was more upset over David's ultimate suicide or the failure of his own hubris is debatable.

For more terrifying things science has done, check out 9 Real Life Mad Scientists and The 5 Weirdest Drug Experiments Performed on Animals .

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out The Singing Android That Will Ruin Robots for You .

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