Last year I wrote a piece about The Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies (INLDT) at Penn State and the vomit-inducing flashlight they were testing for the U.S. military. Actually they called it a LED Incapacitator, but in a recent article, writer and PSU Alum Bryan Farrell calls it what it really is, a "Puke Ray." Uhhh, does it bother anyone else that Penn State is doing research on things like how to make people sick with a flashlight or the chemical agent Fentanyl, to name a few? Just me huh? OK then. Go State!

As Farrell points out, the INLDT is one of the fastest growing research departments under the Applied Research Laboratories (ARL) at Penn State and is one of the top civilian research facilities for the U.S. Navy. And lest you think this is a agricultural school (or business school, or journalism school, or...) it's really a military/defense technology school.

The Office of Military and Security Programs, part of Penn State's Homeland Security Initiative, says their mission is to "position Penn State in the lead among academic institutions for military, homeland security and defense, and information operations research and technology development." And as the article points out, only MIT and Johns Hopkins ranked higher on the Department of Defense's 2003 Research Development Technology and Expenditure when it came to Universities.

But as Farrell says in his article, perhaps the scariest thing about this research being done at Penn State is that students may be used as testing subjects. I mentioned in my previous post about this that the INLDT was going to begin testing the "puke ray" on humans at some point this year, and apparently they are looking to test the effects of 130 decibels on humans for what is essentially a "acoustic bazooka."

So why is it that you don't know any of this is going on at our university? Well, two reasons. One, because you don't read this blog regularly or you would have seen this back in August. And two, because as Farrell says, The Collegian sucks. Ok, he doesn't really say that, I'm saying it.

But plan on reading something about this over the summer in The Collegian, right guys?