It has an innocent enough sounding name -- Active Denial System -- that belies what it is actually doing: firing electromagnetic radiation at a frequency of 95 GHz toward a crowd making individuals feel an intense painful burning sensation on their skin but without actually burning it. People just want to run away.

The Department of Defense recently demonstrated the system which the agency says will give military personnel "something more persuasive than shouting but less harmful than shooting when dealing with potentially hostile crowds."

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According to a department release, at a training area on Marine Corps Base Quantico last week the agency demonstrated two prototype active-denial systems -- one built onto a heavy expanded-mobility tactical truck, the other onto a Humvee. Each truck carries all the electrical generators and thermal systems the transmitters need, operator station included, independent of any grid. Both delivered "a man-sized heat beam to officials and experts, then to service members pretending to be angry protestors, then to fearless volunteers."

The beam, from the same millimeter-wave technology used in airport body scanners, penetrates only 1/64th of an inch into a person's skin and cornea, heating water molecules in the tissue and generating an instinctive and irresistible urge to run from the effect pointed out eloquently here in this Wired video.

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"You're not going to hear it, you're not going to smell it, you're going to feel it, and that provides us with some advantages we can use," said Marine Corps Col. Tracy Tafolla, director of the Joint Non-lethal Weapons Directorate. "The system is state of the art technology, it's not widely known...a lot of perceptions and misconceptions about what the system is and what it isn't. It is a millimeter wave system, it is not a microwave."

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