Nuclear weapon states historically have attached great secrecy to their nuclear weapon and fissile material production programs and stockpiles, despite warnings that this would fuel fears, handicap informed debate and decision making, and drive arms races. As evidenced by the “Action Plan on Nuclear Disarmament” agreed upon at the 2010 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) Re...

OBJECTIVE To examine the descriptive epidemiology of weapon injuries not directly attributable to combat during armed conflict. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SETTING Nangarhar region of Afghanistan, which experienced effective peace, intense fighting, and then peace over six months in 1996. SUBJECTS 608 people admitted to Jalalabad hospital because of weapon injuries. MAIN OUTCOME ME...

The action-specific perception hypothesis (Witt, Current Directions in Psychological Science 20: 201-206, 2011) claims that the environment is represented with respect to potential interactions for objects present within said environment. This investigation sought to extend the hypothesis beyond perceptual mechanisms and assess whether action-specific potential could alter attentional allocatio...

This paper critiques the work and thesis of Judy Wood and Morgan Reynolds suggesting that a "Star Wars" beam weapon was used in the destruction of the World Trade Center towers (referred to herein as the “WR thesis” or “WR paper”). The WR thesis is presented in a web-based paper entitled “The Star Wars Beam Weapon”, which can be found here. The central claim of the WR thesis is that the phenome...

The idea of using light as a weapon can be traced back to Hippocrates, commander of the Greek forces in 212 B.C. His forces supposedly set fire to the sails of the Roman fleet by focusing sunlight with mirrors. Weapons systems based on lasers and “ray guns,” long a staple of science fiction, have captured the imagination of people everywhere. But with steady progress toward the development of l...

Gaze of elite (E) and rookie (R) officers were analyzed as they faced a potentially lethal encounter that required use of a handgun, or inhibition of the shot when a cell phone was drawn. The E shot more accurately than the R (E 74.60%; R 53.80%) and made fewer decisions errors in the cell condition when 18.50% of E and 61.50% of R fired at the assailant. E and R did not differ in duration of t...