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Prepare for a resurgence of CHANTING!!!

Those clever scientists from Astro-Land have come up with something worthy of a new adventure for the Mighty Atom: a "gun" that renders you speechless, literally!

Now it's not supposed to hurt - it just confuses our brains. We can still make "ahhhh" and "duhhh" type sounds, but no conversation. It also works best (so far) on people reading aloud as opposed to those engaged in a conversation.

They cited it's potential use would be in a library setting to silence noisy guests. Yeah, right - the little old librarian is sitting behind the desk zapping people around the room she can hear!


They also said it doesn't work as well on sustained sounds . . . sooooifffweetaalkliiikethissssmaaaybeeeitttwoouldn'twooorkonnusss!

http://www.myfoxorlando.com/dpp/news/scitech/science/030212-japan-invents-speech-jamming-gun-that-silences-people-mid-sentence

PS - here's the punchline - it comes from Ochanomizu University!!! hmy:

I have only had nightmares like that. I hope that never gets popular

Dear Lord, I can't decide if our society is just overly paranoid, or just slowly turning dictorial with stuff like this.

It uses the same principle as those noise-canceling headphones. Though to completely cancel the sound one must be a wavelength or multiples of it away from the source. Thus, when the opposite phase waves meet, they completely cancel each other. Human senses, operating on a non-linear response, might not be able to tell the difference.

I thought it didn't cancel the sound, just repeated it with a 0.2 seconds interval, which causes the speaker strong uncomfort. Most of us already experienced that while speaking in a phone that repeats what we say, we usually stop speaking and have troubles continuing. However, I don't think this would be big troubles: when exposed too much to that, people develop a resistance and manage to speak nevertheless. Difficult, but possible.

I might point this thing towards my boss.

I wonder how far away it works. *goes to do pointless research*