Across Austria, the number of US diplomats affected by the syndrome has risen to 20, the largest number in a single country aside from Cuba - and in a Nato country at that. 
 
Furthermore, as the number of diplomats affected by the syndrome - described by suffers as a serious injury with long-term consequences - has increased, they have apparently formed a mutual-support group, almost like AA, for diplomats who are struggling to get their lives back in order after an attack that causes intense brain trauma without any physical contact.
The cause of the syndrome, which first surfaced in 2016, remains unknown. But the symptoms, which include nausea, severe headaches, ear pain, fatigue, insomnia and sluggishness, typically leave sufferers unable to work. The attacks in Vienna are the first confirmed in a Nato country. Most of the victims were stationed in Cuba, China and Russia.
The CIA has asked a veteran of its hunt for Osama bin Laden to lead a task force aimed at finding the cause of the symptoms.
One diplomat who recently transferred from a posting in a European capital to be treated at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland said doctors there had diagnosed him with a brain injury of the type seen in people exposed to shock waves from explosions.
The symptoms were preceded by piercing ear pain, high-pitched electronic noise and pressure in the ears, which occurred while the person was at home at their apartment back in March.

"There is no evidence about what happened to us, but it is striking that some of us had worked on Russia-related issues," said the worker, who declined to be named.
This patient and others employed by the State Department have set up an informal self-help group, according to three diplomats, one of whom is a member, because those believed to be affected say that the government, while providing care and other support, hasn’t recognized their condition nor taken adequate measures to protect government officials posted abroad.

Whatever the attacks are - some have theorized that they're using concentrated micro waves - they're tantamount to "terrorism", one WSJ source said.

"Whatever it is, it is a form of terrorism—it has caused serious injuries that have been life-altering for some of us," the person said.

A source within the Germany domestic intelligence service told WSJ that methods employed by Russian and Chinese counter-intelligence are getting "more brutal every year".
Russian intelligence has denied any involvement in the attacks.
But as the number of victims' grows, one thing's for certain: whenever the US does find the source of the attacks, it's going to be a major news story.

 
Two teams of scientists have developed new ways of stimulating neurons with nanoparticles, allowing them to activate brain cells remotely using light or magnetic fields. The new methods are quicker and far less invasive than other hi-tech methods available, so could be more suitable for potential new treatments for human diseases.
Researchers have various methods for manipulating brain cell activity, arguably the most powerful being optogenetics, which enables them to switch specific brain cells on or off with unprecedented precision, and simultaneously record their behaviour, using pulses of light.
 
This is very useful for probing neural circuits and behaviour, but involves first creating genetically engineered mice with light-sensitive neurons, and then inserting the optical fibres that deliver light into the brain, so there are major technical and ethical barriers to its use in humans.
Nanomedicine could get around this. Francisco Bezanilla of the University of Chicago and his colleagues knew that gold nanoparticles can absorb light and convert it into heat, and several years ago they discovered that infrared light can make neurons fire nervous impulses by heating up their cell membranes.
They therefore attached gold nanorods to three different molecules that recognise and bind to proteins in the cell membranes – the scorpion toxin Ts1, which binds to a sodium channel involved in producing nervous impulses, and antibodies that bind the P2X3 and the TRPV1 channels, both found in dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons, which transmit touch and pain information up the spinal cord and into the brain.
The researchers added these particles to DRG neurons growing in Petri dishes, so that they would bind to the cells displaying the relevant proteins on their surface. They then exposed the cells to millisecond pulses of visible light, which heated up the particles, causing the cells to fire nervous impulses in response. This was possible not only in isolated neurons but also in slices of tissue from the rat hippocampus. In both situations, the particles stayed firmly in place when added in low concentrations, allowing for repeated stimulation of the cells for over half an hour.

Polina Anikeeva’s team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a slightly different approach, using spherical iron oxide particles that give off heat when exposed to an alternating magnetic field.
First, they injected a virus carrying the TRPV1 gene into the ventral tegmentum of mice, so that neurons would take up the virus and express the gene, making them sensitive to heat. A month later, they injected the nanoparticles into in the same part of the brain, and then applied magnetic fields to it. This made the nanoparticles give off heat enough to activate the TRPV1 channels, causing the neurons to fire long trains of nervous impulses.
Neurons engulf iron oxide nanoparticles, and the researchers found that the particles they injected persisted in the animals’ brains, so that they could continue to activate cells in the ventral tegmentum for up to a month later, while causing less tissue damage than implantable stainless steel electrodes.
Both methods are quite limited in their specificity. The gold nanoparticles bind only to the multiple cell types that express the sodium channel, P2X3, or TRPV1, while the TRPV1 virus and iron oxide particles enter cells at random around the injection site. This is easily solved, as nanoparticles can be conjugated to just about any molecule, but while both methods can activate neurons, neither can inhibit them, and it’s not at all clear how they might be tweaked in order to do so.
Nanoparticles are already being used in other fields. They can, for example, target and destroy malignant cells, and therefore show promise in cancer therapy. More recently, some researchers have exploited their ability to sneak through the blood-brain barrier, and have used them to visualise and reduce stroke damage and inflammation in rats.
Although still in the experimental stages, research like this may eventually allow for wireless and minimally invasive deep brain stimulation of the human brain. Bezanilla’s group aim to apply their method to develop treatments for macular degeneration and other conditions that kill off light-sensitive cells in the retina. This would involve injecting nanoparticles into the eye so that they bind to other retinal cells, allowing natural light to excite them into firing impulses to the optic nerve.
References: Carvalho-de-Souza, J. L., et al. (2015). Photosensitivity of Neurons Enabled by Cell-Targeted Gold Nanoparticles. Neuron, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.02.033
Chen, R., et al. (2015). Wireless magnetothermal deep brain stimulation. Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1261821 [PDF]

Researchers read and write brain activity with light 
‘All-optical’ method for recording and alteration of nervous impulses in living brain. Mo Costandi, 9 May 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2014/dec/22/researchers-read-and-write-brain-activity-with-light

Adam Packer and his colleagues created a strain of mice expressing the Channelrhodopsin protein and an ultrasensitive calcium-binding protein in neurons in the barrel cortex, the part of the brain that receives sensory information from the whiskers. In this way, they could optogenetically activate specific cells while also using high-speed calcium imaging to visualise how they and other cells in the population react to stimulation, through transparent ‘windows’ scraped into the animals’ skulls.
The combination of methods enabled the researchers to determine which neurons contribute to a particular function, and then target them very precisely. To demonstrate the precision of the technique, they used a programmable device called a spatial light modulator that splits the light beam into a hologram consisting of smaller ‘beamlets’, and then simultaneously activated six neurons arranged in the shape of a smiley face.
 
Reference: Packer, A. M., et al. (2014). Simultaneous all-optical manipulation and recording of neural circuit activity with cellular resolution in vivo. Nat. Methods, Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1038/Nmeth.3217

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Targeted NJ Activism Network

T: @soundenemyx

There is a NY/NJ group on meetup.com. Check for the following site at