Pentagon Explores 'Human Fear' Chemicals; Scare-Sensors, 'Contagious' Stress in the Works?
By David Hambling January 18, 2008 | 12:00:00 PMCategories: Bizarro, Chem-Bio,
American military researchers are working to uncover and harness the most terrifying chemical imaginable: that most primal odor, the scent of fear.
Pheromones are chemicals released by animals as signals to their own kind: for sex, for territorial marking, and more. They're often detected in the olfactory membranes. But there's more to pheromones than attraction. Many animals have an alarm pheromone which is used to signal danger; aphids, for example, use it to cause their fellow lice to flee.
Now, the US Army is trying to track down and harness people's smell of fear. The military has backed a study on the "Identification and Isolation of Human Alarm Pheromones," which "focused on the Preliminary Identification of Steroids of Interest in Human Fear Sweat." The so-called "skydiving protocol" was the researchers' method of choice.
The authors collected sweat, urine, blood, saliva, ECG, respiration, and self-report measures in 20 subjects (n=11 males and n=9 females) before, during, and immediately following their first-time tandem skydive, as well as before, during, and immediately following their running on a treadmill for the same period of time. Measurements between the test (skydive) and control (exercise) conditions were made on consecutive days, each experiment precisely matched to the minute between subjects and between conditions to prevent diurnal confounds. Emotional states were monitored using brief standardized questionnaires. For most of the observed compounds, men showed an increase in the compound emission during acute emotional stress, while women showed either no change or a decrease in emission of the compound.
more at:
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/01/pentagon-resear.html
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