TechStuff Classic: TechStuff Arms Itself with Non-lethal Weapons

with non Lethal Weapons. Chris and I sit down to talk about the whole idea behind non lethal weapons, including the somewhat flexible definition of what non lethal is. I hope you guys enjoy and so we wanted to talk today about weapons that are designed to stop a target without killing that target, or at least that that's supposed

to be what they do. Well, yeah, some some of the research I did also turned up other versions of the uh phrase non lethal weapons, including less than lethal weapons, which sounds to me like it is a a verbal uh disclaimer, he's only mostly dead. Well, it's not supposed

to kill you. We actually had somebody, uh we've had some people right in to ask us about a particular one of the ones we're gonna talk about today, But um, really there there's a whole series of different kinds of things that the military and police departments around the world are investigating to basically stop people without hurting them completely. Yeah. Yeah,

so and this is this is tough. I mean, how do you how do you convince someone to stop acting irrationally or dangerously without really hurting that person in turn? And it's tricky, but there are a lot of different approaches that we've tried to take. Yeah, and I was I'm sorry. I was about to say though that there are a lot of reasons why you would want to do this other than you know, simply not wanting to to kill someone. Um, you know, for for strategic reasons.

If you have, say, uh um and this scenario I've seen written about a lot, uh, say an uprising where you have say, hundreds of people uh protesting and maybe the protest is getting out of hand. Well, the the authorities who come to subdue the protesters or dispersed the protesters, Uh, if they kill people, they are likely to escalate uh these kinds of of riots or or disquiet. And uh, you know it's uh, it's happened, you know, we can I can remember stories going back centuries of something like

this happening. So if there's a way to to uh get people to leave without really hurting anybody, that that's an advantage for for everyone. Really. I mean, the protesters don't get hurt as badly or or you know, even if it just makes them feel uncomfortable and they leave as a result of that, I mean, it seems like it's a positive for everyone. Yeah. And and we've tried a lot of different approaches with a lot of different methodologies and a lot of different results, right, not all

of them have been successful. Here's one of the ones I wanted to talk about first. That's just kind of interesting to me. This is using sound as a weapon due to now there are two different ways that sound tends to be used as a weapon. One of them is in something called a long range acoustic device or l l r a D. These are focused beams of sound.

You just you crank up the decibel level to like a hundred fifty deciples, which is about fifty deciples over the pain threshold, and you direct it at the target. And that means the target suddenly has this incredibly loud noise, uh directed at them, and it's a painful experience to hear it. In fact, you can suffer hearing loss if you are subjected to that for two long uh. Some of these devices have actually been used for communication purposes.

I read one report that said that there were navy ships that used a form of l R A D to send out signals to um two boats as they pulled into a harbor. So let's say that a giant navy vessel is sailing into a harbor that's got a busy fishing uh industry, and not all the fishermen are necessarily paying attention to the fact that there's an enormous ship coming in and they need to get out of

the way. I read a report that said that there was a way where you could use this as a communications tool where you're not trying to overpower someone, You're not trying to cripple them. You're just trying to get

their attention and say, hey, buddy, we're coming through. You might want to move, and except you're saying it in whatever the local languages, and that it totally freaks people out because suddenly they can hear this voice coming from really far away, as if it's on a radio or something. But there's no radio. I mean, it's just using a focused beam of sound to direct that sound at the individual and then that gets a little you know, it's

a little unreal surreal, if you will. I would love to have one of these just to mess with people like, hey, hey you, I can see you, you know that kind of stuff. But but but the the other use of this is, like I said, crank it up and you cripple someone because it's just so loud that it it's the pain is um uh difficult to bear on the on the Department of Defense non Lethal Weapons program pages and they have I use these for for my research.

They have a set of current and uh proposed um different kinds of non lethal weapons, and they use what they call acoustic healing devices, which I think are probably related to these uh and they have a picture of one of those. But they say that they use them to to uh give intelligible voice commands over very very

long distances. So I think they you know, from ship to ship, UM, you know, where they're not actually trying to cause pain, but they're using that level of U extra heavy amplification to get a message across and they consider it a weapon. But they're not talking about using it in the exact same way. It's like a really focused bullhorn. Yeah. Yeah. Another UM non lethal weapon that I saw that uses sound as the impulse stunnerd gun. UM. I don't know about this one. No, it's uh, it's

it's pretty neat. UM. Some of these, some of these weapon quote unquote weapons, I guess they're technically weapons, UM, have very interesting names. Uh. This one is would have been used if you've ever watched the movie Thunderball UM, the documentary documentary Thunderball UM, which has a very scintillating underwater battle scene. UM. But if someone had had the impulse stunder gun, that might have gone a different way because basically this is uh used to stop people who

are diving or swimming um underwater. It uses a sound wave that travels underwater that affects the way a person here's and will induce nausea. Oh so it's something you want to feel when you're underwater. No. No, And I mean if you had, you know, divers who are attempting some kind of underwater subterfuge, I wanted to say subterfuge

partially underwater. UM, you know it would it would you think about that, if you were feeling suddenly like you were about to be ill, very violently ill underwater, I imagine it would be very hard to continue on with your actions. You would have to break it off and and for the surface, you know, dive for the surface, what swim to the surface. There we go. Um, but yeah,

that's a pretty neat application of sound too well. And and another one I saw, which did not have a name, or at least not a name that I could find, is a product that was developed by some Japanese engineers. Uh. It was a gun that has a microphone, a directional microphone, and directional speakers. And the what the gun does is you pointed at someone who's being loud and obnoxious, their

voice goes into the microphone. It gets projected back from by the speakers at about a point to second delay, So the person talking starts to hear themselves speaking but point two seconds behind what they're currently saying, which is incredibly distracting. It's very difficult to continue a train of

thought when you're hearing yourself at a slight delay. If you've ever talked on the phone or on any sort of radio device where you got that little bit of an echo or on on Skype, for example, anything like that where you start talking and you start hearing yourself just an instant after you're talking. It can be very disorienting. It can be very disorienting. Yeah, you start talking, then you're thinking, wait, I just said that. No no, I just said that. No no, no, I just said that,

And then you can't make sense of anything anymore. So this particular quote unquote weapon was a sort of a I was designed to try and take care of people who are rude. Yeah, it's not meant to be like something to disperse a crowd or whatever. But there were a lot of of notes I saw on the article. Yeah, that was popular a few a few months ago. I remember seeing seeing that a lot. So it's not it's

not something that the police are using necessarily. It's more like a I'm trying to eat my dinner in a restaurant and you're having a cell phone conversation at the table next to me and you're really annoying. Or I'm at the movie theater and I just want to watch this documentary darnett Um. Yeah, the notes I saw said, what if you use this for someone who's doing some public speaking. But I would imagine that even with directional speakers, it's not so focused that only the person who is

speaking can hear it. You know, it's not like you're beaming the words directly back into the person's ears. Everyone can hear it. So it's not like you could get away with doing something like that. Everyone would know who had done that, and you would, uh, you would very quickly get your come up. And I would imagine depending upon the circumstances of where you used it. Why, um, like I just want to aim at that valedictorian, think

she's so big? Um. Yeah. I was also thinking that that's interesting that we bring that up in an election year here in the United States where people are giving a lot of speeches. We'll see. That was the thing that was That was what a lot of the notes, uh, we're you know, That's what they pertained to, was the idea of some sort of person who's running for an elected office and then disrupting their speech so that they seem like they're an idiot and then gives their opponent

an advantage. But the truth is is that particular weapon or that particular product, whatever you want to call it, would not be so subtle as to allow someone to get away with that. I have another This is not another D O D product. UM actually looks sort of like a series of of flat disks that are a quartered together. Doesn't look very offensive if you will weapon. But it's called the Enhanced Underwater Loudhailer. I told you

they had some strange names. Basically, this is another underwater device that can be used up to uh forty deep in water. UM, and it can it can transmit sound up to four sevens away. Basically they can give It's sort of like the one that they use above the surface of the water. But um, it allows you to uh send on you know. I actually the one I was just talking about a few moments ago, where the the device that you could use to send signals for a very long time, uh, make your commands heard for

a very long distance. They show a picture of a Navy ship. I think you could probably use that in other applications. UM, but yeah, they can also they can also issue commands with this underwater allowed haailer or impair uh um people's hearing underwater for up to two hours.

It will operate so uh pretty neat. It's sort of it's sort of like the In some of the other research I did, I was looking at things like culture ups and devices that you would use to stop vehicles, and I wasn't really going to focus on that, but it sort of seems like that, Like you could drop this underwater. It's battery operated and they can use it to give commands and and affect divers hearing underwater. So pretty neat. Yeah, I'm ready to move on to a

new category unless you have another sound. One no other sound on this is this is moving to the category of air. Okay, using air as a weapon, Oh, sort of like the air Zuka. Yeah, exactly, that's exactly what it is. So air Zuka. So you're talking about a device toy. Yeah, it's a toy. It's a device that

creates a vortex ring. Now vortex ring is kind of imagined sort of like a tornado, except it's in a donut shape and it will it's air that will rotate in this donut shape and it actually will maintain that integrity for a pretty good distance. And the air Zuoka

is just a it's a toy that does this. You pull back a uh a sort of a well, it's a diaphragm really and you let go and it pushes air out through a nozzle and that creates the spinning vortex of air that then can go across the room and hit someone in the face and they feel like someone just you know, blew a huge breath of air right in their face for for no apparent reason. So, yeah, you walk in the door of a room, someone across the room has gone whoop, and then you go, hey,

what was that? Well, and there's and I mean it doesn't move that fast either, So it's kind of funny because you actually can see, you know, there's there are a few seconds between when someone might fire one and someone else might feel it, and so you're just waiting in waitings that didn't work. Oh yeah, there's the guy. They're flinching. Now, yep, it worked. Well, you can actually kick that up a notch and weaponize it. And if you use pressurized gas and you accelerate the gas to

supersonic velocity as it exits the nozzle. Once it comes out of that nozzle, it becomes a high spin vortex ring that can travel a good long distance and be strong enough to knock over someone. Oh around a hundred eighty pounds, so they it's like getting shoved in the chest by a really strong person. It's just it's just that it's air. Now, you could also, if you were so inclined, add in um malodorance. I you know, there were so many jokes that I was thinking about making,

and I'm you're just not helping you. Well, the malodorance would be designed the maloderant, of course, of something that smells bad. But a malodorant could be designed to induce nausea, uh, or for to make your eyes water. So then you're getting shoved by a very stinky person essentially. But when I say stinky person, I'm talking about smells. They're so bad that you might feel like wretching. It's it's not like it's not just you know, oh that's like rotten eggs. No,

it's way way worse. And uh you could even put in other stuff too, if you really wanted to, like some something that would affect you even more um acutely than a malodorant. But anyway, that's the general idea is

just using air to knock back a person. Now, in this case, you're talking about a weapon designed to really knocked back individuals, right, you're not talking about like if there's a group of people, uh, walking up, shooting each one with a vortex of air is gonna take a while because you have to let that pressure build back up again and you have to then release the gas so that it goes out. And of course, again that's a projectile that does and move as fast as say

a bullet or even sound or anything like that. So it starts to slow down almost immediately as it moves out, well really immediately as soon as it objects from the nozzle. So even though it's moving at supersonic speeds within the nozzle, once it gets out, it starts to slow down. Um. So it's not it's not something that you could use

on a mass of people. But if you're talking about aiming at a specific person to knock them down, perhaps it's a individual who has shown himself to be a danger or herself to be a danger to others, than it would be a useful tool without actually causing that person direct harm. Now, granted, if the person falls down, there's always the chance that person could suffer serious injury in that fall, but the the impact of the air

itself should not necessarily cause injury. Um. Yeah, I don't really have a lot of air based I can move onto electricity. Well you know it. I do have one that's uh that sort of reminds me of that sort of out of that um that field. And there was one that that I saw as a UM it would be very effective against vehicles, but it also would make you, um, well slip called polymer ice. Did you run across this one at all? Oh, this is not now, this is

this is a this is a spray. But apparently what it is is essentially uh, you know, a polymer is as a chemical, and they would use it in places where the military is looking into this as a possibility apparently for especially for places that are particularly warm, like the Middle East or um, you know, places closer to the equator than say, I don't know, Greenland, um or maybe Atlanta, Georgia on a summer's day exactly. But if effectively creates sort of you would spray it on the

ground and it would effectively create a icy situation. So this this plastic would make people slip and fall as though they were on ice. Um. Now, if you're if you're thinking Keystone Cops sort of thing. So you're chasing somebody and they've set up a trap ahead of them so that the polymer is on the ground now, so they're starting to fall, and then of course the people who are chasing them also begin to slip and fall, so everybody is writhing around in the ground because they

can't get up. It's like a bunch of turtles on their backs. Yeah. Um, they have been working on a counter agent for this that they could use the shoes. They could use it on the shoes and tires of vehicle vehicles that are, you know, running after them. It's still a really advanced version of my automatic banana peel tosser.

But yeah, the whole you know, making people fall down thing where you were just talking about that a moment ago with using the high powered air, I thought, oh, slipping in falling down, that sounds like the if you could use the two together, so you could really have people on their backs. So this is the reason why I really wanted to do this, uh, this topic, because the more we talk about the more it sounds like we're entering a world where Acme products from Warner Brothers

cartoons are a reality. Well, people still like talking about that that effort that the US military made to weaponize bats. Well there's also the whole weaponized dolphins thing. Yes, yes, and then those those things are actually well we're actually real. So hey, yeah, there's some some of these are really cool and some of them are sillier than not. You take advantages anyway you can get them, and not everything pans out, all right, So let's move on to electricity.

So there's plenty of that. Yeah, you know, you have your typical stun guns, which a basic stun gun is a device that has a couple of electrode prongs that when you when you activate it, electricity passes between the two prongs. So if you were to put that in contact with a human you could shock them and generally it's a strong enough electric shock to make their muscles

seize up. It causes pain, and it also makes people fall over if the if the shocks enough for their muscles to seize up like that, they lose control of their muscle um, their muscle movements and they fall over. Um yeah, it's you can't you can't stop that, you know, because our muscles do work on electrochemical signals. So if you use electricity to override those signals, then suddenly they

just start contracting like crazy and you can't really do anything. Um. As someone who has actually felt the sting of an underpowered stunt gun, I can tell you it is not a pleasant experience. It felt like it felt like a really intense beasting because the one that was I was gonna say, used on me, but really I used it on myself. Uh, I was an idiot kid. I don't want to know. It was not the first one to do it either. I watched until several other people went

owl that that hurts. The next one's like, hey give me that owl, Well, that does hurt, and next person, hey, give me that al and then came round to me. I'm like, all right, give me that. But the battery had really run down, so it wasn't a very powerful stun gun. And really the reaction we all had was if you hit an attacker with that particular stun gun because the battery been worn down so much, you really would have just irritated them, because again, it wasn't enough

to make all your muscles contract. It made you made made whatever muscle it was in contact with twitch like crazy, and it stung, but it wasn't enough to really be a deterrent well, a real stun gun with a fully charged batteries serious business that can make you fall over and it can be a while before you can get

back up again. And perhaps the most I would argue, the most famous name in this sort of technology, although it's not just stunt gun, is taser, and a typical taser is a device that ejects a pair of electrodes,

fires them at a target. UH. The electrodes trail a wire that connects back to the handheld device, and then once it comes into contact with the target, electricity flows through the wires into those electrodes and shocks the target and again creates a shock strong enough to make all those muscles contract and the person generally winces, says something along the lines of al and falls over UM. And

the intention is to do this in a non lethal way. Now, there have been deaths associated with the use of tasers. In some cases it was because of the way the target or the person will say person target is just the generic term, but the person fell, and then the fall was partially what killed the person. In some cases, it might be that the person had a pacemaker or some other medical device that got UH that malfunction due to the electric shock. Sometimes it has to do with

drugs that are in the persons system. Anyway, even though it's meant to be non lethal, not every single instance is non lethal. So these are and that's pretty much true of all those things we're talking about that have these really serious consequences, is that they could potentially kill somebody. Well that that basic taser you can fire that at

someone who's maybe twenty ft away. But Taser came up with something pretty interesting that I saw, I think back in two thousand nine at c S. Right, I believe you're talking about an article you wrote on how Stuff Works dot com. Yeah, the Taser shotgun. Yes, yeah, well actually isn't the shotgun itself just the shotgun show. But you do you do get you can't have a specific shotgun that is designed to only fire these Taser shotgun shells,

so they won't fire a round of shot. But these Taser shotgun shells, inside the the shell is a Taser device. There are the little electronic probes that will stick into whatever the target is. The back half of the shell detaches and there are a bunch of there are a couple of wires where it will attach to the probes. The back half dangles down from the target and then

shoots electricity through those prongs. So that gives military or police the ability of firing a taser at a much greater range than they could if they were just using a handheld device. Also, the shotgun shell has little fins on it that stabilize its flight. So yeah, I've seen my regular shotgun that has shot that dispersed, disperses as soon as you fire. Yeah, this this is so that it will give it a stable flight paths, so that it'll it'll fly in the the straight direction of where

you're aiming the shotgun. Right, And if I remember the article correctly, you wrote that there if if they try to remove it, then they get shocked. Yeah, the the wires that have the electricity running through them are not shielded, so I need to remove this. Yeah, then you grab it and then you get shocked again, and it does send pulses of electricity through and I think it's like twenty seconds of a pretty serious shock so that it'll

immobilize the person. Um. Yeah, And they were showing every time I see taser at c s, they are they tend to be showing off their technology by bringing in volunteers, and I cannot imagine ever being a volunteer for that. I took a pepper spray certification course. Did you actually have to get hit by the pepper spray to be actually certified? Yes? And everyone I elected not to. I watched everyone else do it, and I was very glad

that I had not elected not to. Yeah, everyone I've seen, I mean, I've known a lot of people who have gone into the military, into or into the police force, or even into uh to firefighter courses where part of it is that they have to be exposed to this stuff so that they understand what the consequences are and they know what the effect is. Well, in every case it has been a horror story to hear about their experiences. Well, yeah,

that's the uh, that's the thing. One of the reasons that pepper spray is more effective than a lot of chemical weapons, from what I understand, is that, um uh, no matter what you might be uh taking, if you're on some kind of drug that might otherwise, um, you know, make you feel less pain. Uh, the pepper spray will still make everything swell up involuntarily. UM, So you might you might not notice the pain, but the swelling will still impede you. Yeah, and that was one of the

reasons that that they have to do that. It was because actually goes back to your shocking yourself story, is to keep people from going, hey, Bill, look at that. You know, uh, you don't want to do that on on just just for kicks. It's not something that that's serious business. But well, yeah, I have one other electricity one. Okay, cool, and then I can actually add a couple of things that are similar. Groovy. Chris and I will be back to talk more about non lethal weapons in just a moment,

but first let's take a quick break. The last one I wanted to talk about is still a taser one is the Taser shock Wave. I don't know much about this one. This was another one that I saw on display the same time as a shotgun. Now. Shock Wave is essentially it's a bank of tasers. Take six regular taser guns to get they're in a twenty degree arc, uh and put them on a tripod and then you set it out in front of you and that way, when the rampaging horde of zombies comes at you, you

can fire off if you wanted to. You can fire off all six at the same time, hitting those those people as they come at you. You can also stack them. Are zombies affected by electricity? Well they there muscles would have to be right. You would think there would be a galvanic response. Yeah, clearly there's a galvanic response. I mean, come on, Frankenstein alone, all right. Anyway, we'll have this

discussion offline. But you can stack these taser shock waves, so you can have three or four of them stacked on top of each other, which means now you've got four or three or four times that, and so eighteen or twenty four stun guns at your taser stun guns at your disposal. This is terrifying to look at in person.

I mean, you look at this thing and you just think of the You realize that this is for very serious problems like an uprising or a riot or something where there are there's a demonstrable danger to people in property, Like I think about the riots that happened in London and in the summer of Uh. This is the sort of thing where you could imagine UH, something like this deployed where it's you know, you wouldn't think of this

as a uh. The first option, But it's definitely one of those things that you know, could be in an arsenal for trying to do crowd control or prevent a mob or a riot from attacking a particular target. Anyway, it basically functions the same way as a taser stun gun.

It's just that you have, uh, put a whole bunch of them together in series and uh actually I guess technically they're all in parallel and you can stack them and and so it's like instead of having to have a whole bunch on hand where as soon as you because as soon as you fire a taser, you can't just immediately redeploy it. You know, First of all, you have you would have to reel in the electrodes again, You'd have to have a new uh cartridge of propellant

in order to shoot those electrodes out again. You would also have to have a charged up battery to to deliver the shock. So this is what gives you that capacity without having to have a whole bunch in a box behind you. Yeah, that would that would be another advantage of having the taser shotgun shell, Yeah, because you can reload very quickly and and yeah, that's absolutely terrifying. Really anyway, what was your next category? Let me see before I I was going to go onto one of

my favorite types of technology of all time, lasers. Okay, well before before we do that, since we were talking about the taser shotgun shell a moment ago um. The Department of Defense also has weapons that it uses in shotguns, UM, such as stingball shells. Um. Wow. Sting sting balls are essentially I mean, they're shot, but they're rubber, so it's

almost like the bean bag guns too. Um. This is why I think that some people use less than lethal because I imagine that a rubber pellet, well judging by the effects of hockey pucks on unprotected hockey players when they get hit with them or even protected ones, you know, and that's a frozen piece of rubber. So you know, I'm thinking that if it were coming at you fast enough,

it could do significant damage. But they used they use sting balls in another and several other types of weapons like the there's a stingball grenade that launches the little rubber pellets and a modular crowd control munition which is about the size of a Claymore mine and send six hundred six hundred rubber balls out at high speed quote unquote to suppress targets. And I'm pretty sure if an explosion of six hundred little rubber balls we're happening right

next to me, then I would probably be suppressed. Yeah. Yeah, Well, here's the thing is that when we talk about things like these, these devices that shoot out uh projectiles at high speeds, clearly there's already an added danger there because you've got something that's causing the stuff to fly out at those those velocities right right, So you have some sort of propellant or explosive that is giving these things

the kinetic energy they need to suppress crowds. Clearly, I would imagine if you are right there next to whatever it is when it goes off, you could suffer a really severe injury, if not, if not death. Well, you know they used the flash band grenades. Uh, they use, you know, these explosive devices to propel these out, and if you're standing right next to it, if the uh the charge is loud enough, I'm sure it could damage

you're hearing. I mean thinking back to uh Keith Moon's famous appearance with the who um on the Smothers Brothers show. Where he put a uh, basically just an off the shelf UM explosive inside his bass drum. And yeah, and and Pete Townsend's hearing is was damaged permanently by that. Yeah. Townsend had some some some interesting things to say about that, although not immediately after the explosion because he couldn't hear anything. Yeah. Um,

so so that's certainly an issue. I've played paintball too, Have you ever played? Um? One of the first things that I know, and those use the paintball guns use compressed carbon dioxide capsules UM to fire the paintballs out. Now, actually they use UM similar things in law enforcement. In the military, they have capstas and capsules basically pepper spray in paintball form if you will, UM, and they have guns that that fire those. But UM, you know, I

was the first, very first game I played. I'd never played before. If you're wearing goggles, okay, so if you have a stingball grenade and you are in a crowd and you don't have goggles on, then your eyes are

obviously in danger. But this is one of those things where you you put the goggles on and you you're ready to go and everybody's set up on your teams, and they blow the whistle to start the paintball game, and the paintball you start to hear the sounds of the paintballs behind you and your several hundred feet away from the people who are firing them, and you're starting to go, you know what, this is gonna hurt when I get shot, And as it turns out, it does.

So I mean these these weapons, I mean talking about rubber balls and some of these other things that these projectiles, even though they are designed to be non lethal, can cause damage. Uh, you know if you if you get hit with them in the right spot, I mean, you know, it might be you might get one in the arm from a thousand feet away. Go ow, Okay, so you went out, But if you were standing right next to it, it could cause a lot more damage. If you're near it and you got it in the rib, you can

have a broken rib or at least a bruised rib. Well, they cause wealth, those paintballs, I would imagine. So moving on to lasers, one of the most basic forms of using a laser as a non lethal weapon is you don't you don't have a high powered laser use a low powered laser to direct light at optics or sensors or people's vision and you're just trying to blind them. Now, these are called dazzlers or personal halting and stimulation response weapons. Acronym is phaser. I know it's not mine. I didn't

make it up. Yeah. The Department of Defense has what it calls the Green Laser Interdiction System. Yeah, that's exactly. Yeah, that's another way of putting it. Yeah, and they mount those on rifles to h to dazzle their opponents. Well, I mean, you think about it. There have been stories in the media about people who are using off the shelf laser pointers and pointing them at aircraft to be

funny to blind the pilots. Yeah. The in this case, which these these lasers are are, they're low powered in the sense that they're not they're not powered high enough to do physical damage against something. They're not going to do any sort of vaporization or ablation or anything like that. But they will they will cut straight through things like fog and um and they are very very bright, and they're bright enough to actually blind you temporarily if you

were to look into it. And it also again is used to to confuse sensors and optics, so that let's say that you've got a coordinated attack on a target. This way you can, um, you can minimize their defenses as much as you can when you're attack is approaching. Um. Actually, if you think about it, you um, well, they also have a device called ocular interruption, which is sort of

a broader effect. Um. You know, they could use it to uh to worn and suppress uh people who are you know, the enemy or the the opponents of the military, law enforcement trying to stop people. But it uh, it's a it's rather than shining a pinpoint type laser directly at somebody, it's more of a very very bright light distributed um. And you think about you get some smoke grenades and uh some some lasers and very bright lights, and you either have a very effective way to confuse

people or a rock concert, a Pink Floyd concert. Well, and looking at pictures of this, it's very it's very reminiscent of the kinds of effects that you would see at a at a rock concert. All in all, there's just another brick in the wall. Okay, So moving on with more laser stuff. How have you heard about laser induced plasma channels. No, I haven't l i PC. All right, so this is kind of an interesting idea. So you

know what a plasma is. It's an ionized gas. Plasm, no plasma, all right, let's just come on really in, big guy. So plasma is an ionized gas, which means that it has free electrons flowing through this gas. It means that the gas itself can conduct electricity. So imagine

that you use a laser to create a channel of plasma. So, in other words, you've got this area of of atmosphere and then you create a channel of plasma within a pretty narrow channel, and then you fire electricity down that channel. It'll go across that channel as if it were a wire, so you could beam electricity in a way. Now, these things require a lot of power and they don't have

a lot of distance to them. So instead of being used as a weapon where you would direct it at an approaching enemy, you use it as a way of barricading a hallway or a corridor. So you create these lasers that go up and down, say a wall, so they're they're aligned horizontally like you could do them vertically too, if you wanted to but horizontally across um a hallway. You shoot this laser across the hallway, which creates this

thin channel of plasma that spans the hallway. Then you shoot electricity along that channel, and now you've got these zapping beams of electricity spanning the hallway, which act as a pretty strong deterrent against anyone who has trying to make unauthorized access to that corridor. I don't know, I've seen all those spy movies. All you have to do is, you know, do cartwheels and stuff over the lasers. Electricity works a little differently than lasers do. But yeah, go

ahead and give that a shot. Um. Yeah, Actually that's reminiscent, you know, jokes aside, that's reminiscent of the Plasma Cutter podcast that we did sometime ago. Yeah, it's not not entirely different. Now most of the effects and this is intended again to be a non lethal a way of of stopping people from accessing uh hallways and court ours. Uh, it's it's not you know, it's not the most efficient means of trying to keep people out because it does

require quite a bit of power to operate. Um. And then I have the pulsed energy projectile or p e P. Now this is one of the versions of the pain ray, and in fact, we were specifically asked about the pain right now, it's a shame about ray. This reminds me of that time you tried to draw a hole in your head. Uh. The actually was egne the But this, this particular weapon is different from the other one we'll talk about, which uses microwaves. We move onto that in

a little bit. This one uses a laser and again creates plasma. We have a bit more to say about non lethal weapons, but Chris and I will have to do that after we take this quick break. So the pulsed energy projectile what it does. It uses a deuterium fluoride laser that emits a very high powered invisible laser. It's in the infrared spectrum that when it hits something, it essentially starts to vaporize what it hits, just on the very surface level. So if it hit you, it

would start to vaporize you, but not like disintegrating. It would just be on the very surface, so like the top level of skin or whatever. But then it creates an exploding plasma. The electrons that the gas will give off start to get even more energized as this laser pulses, and that energy creates this exploding plasma and that in turn will stun a target and it gives off this electromagnetic radiation that activates your nerve cells, which can give you the sense of pain. And that pain could be

in many different forms. It could be depending upon the the pulse. It could be a stabbing pain, it could feel like burning, it could feel like ice um. And then there's also a lethal version of this technology called the pulse impulsive kill laser, which has the best acronym of all time pickle m p I k L so deadly pickle. So when you fire, fire that you oppressed the pickle switch. That's right, Yes, give him the pickle. So this was developed by a company called Mission Research Corporation,

which is now part of Alliance Tech Systems. And there's some downsides to this weapon. Uh. One of the biggest is that it's huge. This is an enormous weapon that requires essentially a vehicle to move it around, so it's a mounted weapon at the time and right now, and weighs around like five pounds, So it's not something that could be deployed in a uh like for your average infantry soldier. You know that there's just there's no way

of of miniaturizing it down at the moment, so it's effective. Uh, and it is supposed to again supposed to be non lethal. It essentially stuns the target and makes them hurt, but it doesn't kill them or or specifically actually injure them. It's just again activating their their nerve endings, so there's no physical damage going on. It's just stimulating those nerve endings to create pain, which in a way is like absolutely terrifying, right, you know, it's there's no physical damage

being done, but still really scary. Uh. But not widely deployed, right right. Yeah, the the they've been talking about these weapons for quite some time, years and years at this point, and uh, the the one that we really should talk about has uh well its own set of drawbacks, but it does use microwaves. Um and uh let's see where where to begin. Well, I guess we can call it the the There are two different versions of it that I read about, the active denial system. Yeah, that's the

one I've read about MEDS. Well, there's also one called the silent Guardian, which is kind of a little brother to a d S. So a d S has a range of around five and silent Guardian has a range of around two. So, but they both work on the same principle. They both use microwaves to create a pain ray and it gives you the sensation of burning when you're hit by it. You feel like you are are like your skin is being subjected to incredibly high temperatures.

I watched a CBS report on this, and the reporter actually withstood several blasts of this and explain what it like. He said that it felt like scalding water was being poured over his entire body, and he was wearing you know, it was actually a cool day. He was wearing a pretty heavy jacket. And he says that the microwaves just penetrate straight through the clothing, so the clothing offered no protection whatsoever. It didn't matter if his skin where was

exposed or not. Uh. He then held up a piece of plywood to use as a shield, and he said the problem was that using that still kept a lot of his body unprotected, and um, just hitting his feet and his hands was enough to make him dodge all the way of the the the pain ray. Now he used a mattress which helped a little bit. Beca said, even then he could only get so far before it got so painful that he couldn't stand it anymore. And uh, and this is, you know, again, a pretty scary technology.

It uses a microwave around ninety giga hurts of frequency and at that frequency. Uh, the the penetration of the microwave is only about one sixty four of an inch, so it's designed so it will not cook you from the inside out. Yeah, microwave oven goes much deeper than that. It can go several centimeters into whatever it is that it is being exposed to it. Um and this, uh,

this device is is really um. I read that. Um. They had the military had invited several people to uh, the Marine Corps Basic Quantico, Virginia to experience this because basically they've been trying to drum up support for this. This device has been around for literally like fifteen twenty years now. Um. And then again, this is one of the devices that has been pursued very actively by the military and an attempt to come up with something that is less than lethal in a way to discourage people

and yes it does work. UM. The reason they're having to drum up support for it UH is, for one thing, it's known that it uses microwaves. UM. They deployed the military deployed several of these UH pain raise to UM the Middle East to use in theaters over there in the last few years, and they never really used them because they were afraid that people would start talking about how the military we're using microwaves UH, and they you know, oh, well you're going to cook us or you're going to

make a sterile. Yeah, you're going to irradiate us. You're publicity, which is if you're trying to say, look, you know, we don't want UH fighting to escalate. We just want to break this argument up and stop this particular incident right here. It's it's funny because a lot of this is based on ignorance of how microwaves work, because microwaves are a form of non ionizing radiation, right, But a lot of people don't they understand that. They think of

it in terms of the microwave oven. We know that that can be used to irradiate and cook. And people think this this pain ray if it were left on someone and they were unable to move. It would cause burns. You know, people have been put in the hospital. Yeah, you would, You could, you could suffer actual burns to your skin. Now you're not going to have the if you were sitting there long enough, those burns would start to burn through you. But the you wouldn't immediately suffer

like deep burns. You would have skin burns, which aren't that's no joy either. But it heats your skin up to about degrees fahrenheit, which is about fifty four degrees celsius. And uh, at that temperature, you're not it's it's it's enough for it to be painful, so you want to get out of the way. It's not supposed to be so hot that it's going to immediately cause blisters to form and that kind of thing. Um, but you know

that's it. Definitely, there are there's a perception that since it uses microwaves, it is more even I want to say more sinister, but really, when you're talking about inflicting pain, that's pretty sinister already, or at least it can be. Can that's what it can be perceived as. But it's not as as it doesn't cause injury the way you would immediately assume once you hear a microwave, right right, Um,

there's another problem with it too, what's up. It takes a lot of energy and it takes a long time to turn on, So you can't say there's a demon demonstration that has gone out of hand. There are people throwing stuff, there are people looting, and you want to stop them. You don't drive up in the truck with the pain rain mounted on it. Um the ones that the pictures I've seen show a humvy well, a giant it looks like a giant satellite dish sort of thing on the top of the big antenna. The P E

P is essentially a very similar form factor. Yeah, and you don't you don't, you know, drive up in the pain rainmobile and flip the switch and cause everybody to stop burning and looting. It takes a long time to power up. I've seen hours listed as the time it takes to power First, you have to have a comedian come, I'll warm up the crowd. Hey, so that wants things really get cooking. That's when you turn on the microwave. I see you're all looting. Hey, I like to say

some shoes, you know. Whenever you're looting and there's just nothing to pick up and throw through the window of that department store. Doesn't that just make you crazy? Say you got a size ten can key Stonora over there, run they run tight? So so um, yeah, this is

that that's also a problem with it. It's not something that it has to be in place and on um and in the case of having it vehicle mounted, that means you have to be running the engine to keep the power on or you know, a lot of battery usage, and that's uh in an arrow when fuel is a lot more dear and cost um. That is a downside

that that's hard to ignore. So um, this very sophisticated non lethal weapon may just end up shelved because it uh, you know, it's just yeah, Now, did you have any others you wanted to talk about, because I'm done, But you said you had a few futuristic ones that you want. There was one. I know, we're running a little along, so I just wanted to mention the one. I actually saw a thing and wired about this and in the magazine a few years ago, which is when when you

mentioned this, I thought, oh, that would be fun. I still can't find where I put that, But there was one that I read about then that I just I found a little bit on and they've still they've pursued it, but it seems like it's still sort of fallen by the wayside. And that would be the goog gun um and uh. It's been called different things, but what it's designed to do, it's sort of like the the polymer ice, except it's designed to immobilize a target by shooting gooey

silly string like stuff at them, uh and wired. And I remember it saying that it used some kind of bone derivative to to use this, and it's supposed to harden up when you get sprayed with it. I see, So it's a foam that that then solidifies. Yeah, and I think, um, I think now what they've been using is more of a synthetic polymer type uh material. I've I've seen pictures of it. Um. It looks almost like the pink slime that people have been talking about about

meat processing lately. It's a sort of a gooey pink uh tube like stuff. The problem is it doesn't harden quickly enough to stop someone who's running, so you end up gooey, but you don't end up hardening up like a cartoon character after they've been coated in cement, which is to say, you know, within about half of a second. You know, every time somebody gets poured on concrete on him in the cartoons, you know, and instantly hard you know, it doesn't do that. Um, So that's kind of disappeared

from that um, from that usage. But I have seen that people are using net guns, and they've been using some kind of sticky material on the net so that the net sticks to you. And that seems like it might be promising, because if you shoot somebody with the net, um then uh, you know, and it has that sticky stuff and you can't think of it as like fly paper. All of a sudden you're tangled up in this net. You can't run anymore. Um. It seems like that would be hard to load. You know, it would be more

effective against a very small number of people. If you're dealing with a horde of zombies. I don't think you're If you're by yourself, you're pretty much stuck. Yeah. Well, I got five of them, but three hundred more are coming at me. I think I'm in trouble close up them all. Well, I found the I found the article I think that you were talking about on Wired. It's called Army reloads on Sticky Foam Weaponry. Yeah, that that is one of the newer articles they This was one

of those. It was a feature on a series of things and it had the pain ray. It was it was literally like a series of a couple of paragraphs each um in the print magazine. Yes, that is. That is when I consulted now, and it's the picture of the guy covered in foam. It looks like he's been attacked by a bunch of octope. Yes string, it's probably a few centimeters in diameter to spray. It's it's not an attractive look. And that wraps up another classic episode

of tech stuff. I hope you guys enjoyed it and learned something. We have more non lethal weapons that have been introduced since this podcast was recorded. But I am never ever going to forget the first time I ever saw a taser shotgun. That was a heck of a thing to see in person. Not I don't ever, ever ever want to have the experience of being hit by one, not at all. So let's just skip that part. But if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of

tech Stuff. You can write to me and let me know. The email address is text stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can pop on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. There you're gonna find links to our presence on social media. You also find archives of all the episodes we've ever recorded, including these classics. And you'll find a link to our online store. And I'll talk to you again really soon. Hext Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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