Jul 24, 2019

Mystery of Cuban "health attacks" grows with study of diplomats' brains

Sam Baker

Remember the news about a potential “health attack” against American diplomats stationed in Cuba in 2016? Well, something seems to have happened to those diplomats’ brains — it’s just not clear what, exactly.

Flashback: In 2017, dozens of American diplomats who had been working in Havana began reporting unusual symptoms such as persistent headaches, hearing loss and blurred vision.

  • The initial fear was that they had been victims of a “sonic attack,” perhaps using some kind of microwave technology.
  • But other scientists subsequently cast doubt on that possibility, suggesting instead that it might have been a case of mass hysteria.

Whatever happened, it probably isn’t simply psychosomatic, according to a new clinical evaluation of 40 of the affected diplomats. The findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

  • MRIs of the diplomats’ brains showed differences between the diplomats’ brains and a control group’s brains, but the study doesn’t reach any conclusions about how those differences came to be.

The bottom line: "All you can say is something happened, which caused their brain to change," Ragini Verma, a professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study’s authors, told NPR.

Go deeper

Kaveh Waddell

The tricky business of improving human brains

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

Connecting brains directly to machines has helped paralyzed people begin to speak and amputees feed themselves again — early steps toward the miraculous cures that have been the main focus of the neurotechnology field.

But a smaller group of researchers and startups — plus the Pentagon — is working toward an even longer-term goal fraught with scientific and moral hurdles. They plan to improve on healthy humans, in a bid to pick up where evolution left off.

Go deeperArrowJul 25, 2019
Alison Snyder, Kaveh Waddell

Looking to AI to understand how we learn

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

Two parallel quests to understand learning — in machines and in our own heads — are converging in a small group of scientists who think that artificial intelligence may hold an answer to the deep-rooted mystery of how our brains learn.

Why it matters: If machines and animals do learn in similar ways — still an open question among researchers — figuring out how could simultaneously help neuroscientists unravel the mechanics of knowledge or addiction, and help computer scientists build much more capable AI.

Go deeperArrowAug 8, 2019 - Technology
Caitlin Owens

Surprise bills are everywhere

Data: Sun, Mello, Moshfegh and Baker, 2019; Chart: Harry Stevens/Axios

Surprise medical bills have gotten more common and more expensive, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Why it matters: These bills can be devastating to patients, even those who have some savings and a steady source of income.

Go deeperArrowAug 13, 2019 - Health