2012 Japanese Ig Nobel Prize-winning Invention Patented by US Navy in 2021

The US Navy has obtained a patent (US patent #11082763, “Handheld acoustic hailing and disruption systems and methods”), here in the year 2021, for a device essentially the same as the invention that earned an Ig Nobel Prize in the year 2012 for a team of Japanese inventors. Unsound Invention, Anew New Scientist magazine reports […]

Classical music: has it been ‘weaponized’?

“Classical music was first used as a deterrent by 7-Eleven convenience stores in British Colombia, Canada. In 1985, branch managers began piping classical music into the stores’ parking lots in order to prevent teenagers from congregating there.” – explains Dr Marie Thompson who is a lecturer at Lincoln School of Film & Media, Lincoln University, […]

Cooking up a weapon: Kangri for the angry

Warfare breeds ingenuity of a sort: “Use of Kangri (A Traditional Firepot) as a Weapon,” Arsalaan F. Rashid, Rifat Fazili, and Akash D. Aggarwal, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 2014. (Thanks to investigator Ivan Oransky for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences Medical College and Govt. Medical College, […]

Slimeball: A sticky weapon to immobilize large ships

Slime would become the US military’s prime weapon to immobilise large ships under a scheme outlined for the US Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College. Lieutenant Commander Daniel Whitehurst, a student at the college, figured out how to combine a raft of existing technologies to produce the officially “non-lethal” armament he calls The Slimeball. He prepared a report in […]