Soviet-Style ‘Torture’ Becomes ‘Interrogation’
HOW did the United States, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, come to adopt interrogation techniques copied from the Soviet Union and other cold war adversaries?

Investigators for the Senate Armed Services Committee are examining how the methods, long used to train Americans for what they may face as prisoners of war, became the basis for American interrogations.

In 2002, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon became concerned that standard questioning was inadequate for suspected terrorists and turned to a military training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE. For decades, SERE trainers had exposed aviators and others at high risk for capture to Soviet-style tactics, including disrupted sleep, exposure to extreme heat and cold, and hours in uncomfortable stress positions. Sometimes the ordeal included waterboarding, in which a prisoner’s face is covered with cloth and water is poured from above to create a feeling of suffocation.

Some of those techniques have been used on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the C.I.A.’s secret overseas jails for high-level operatives of Al Qaeda.

Many SERE veterans were appalled at the “reverse engineering” of their methods, said Charles A. Morgan III, a Yale psychiatrist who has worked closely with SERE trainers for a decade.

“How did something used as an example of what an unethical government would do become something we do?” he asked.

His question is only underscored by a 1956 article, “Communist Interrogation,” in The Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, recently turned up by the Intelligence Science Board, which advises the spy agencies. Written by doctors working as Defense Department consultants, Lawrence E. Hinkle Jr. and Harold G. Wolff, the article shows that methods embraced after 2001 were once considered torture that would produce false information[...]

The Beam of Light That Flips a Switch That Turns on the Brain

Which clusters of nerve cells trigger memory recall, or are associated with learning a new skill, or emotional states?

By INGFEI CHEN
Published: August 14, 2007

It sounds like a science-fiction version of stupid pet tricks: by toggling a light switch, neuroscientists can set fruit flies a-leaping and mice a-twirling and stop worms in their squiggling tracks.

Light stimulation every 200 milliseconds generates electrical activity, right, in an area of the brain associated with depression.

But such feats, unveiled in the past two years, are proof that a new generation of genetic and optical technology can give researchers unprecedented power to turn on and off targeted sets of cells in the brain, and to do so by remote control.

These novel techniques will bring an “exponential change” in the way scientists learn about neural systems, said Dr. Helen Mayberg, a clinical neuroscientist at Emory University, who is not involved in the research but has seen videos of the worm experiments.

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” Dr. Mayberg said.

Some day, the remote-control technology might even serve as a treatment for neurological and psychiatric disorders...

Japanese teach robot to dance
Scientists in Japan have taught a human-sized robot to imitate the steps of a dancer.

They say the prancing dancebot could be used to record the movements of traditional dances that are being lost as their performers die off.

To demonstrate the robot's prowess, the team programmed the 1.5 metre tall machine to imitate the graceful sways and whirls of the Aizu Bandaisan, a Japanese folk routine.

To prove its accuracy, the robot can perform alongside a human dancer. And despite its "Terminator" appearance, the robot is remarkably lifelike.

Shin'ichiro Nakaoka and his colleagues at Tokyo University taught the dancebot - named HRP-2 or Promet - by using video-capture techniques to record human dance movements. According to New Scientist magazine, these were converted into a sequence of robotic limb movements and fed into Promet's processors.

"They have got it to directly copy human movements. That is very difficult because the joints of the robot are very different from the joints of a human," said Noel Sharkey, a robotics expert at Sheffield University. The advance would allow robots to perform human-like movements on factory production lines, for example[...]