Spanish Gangs Use Voodoo to Traffic Girls

Earlier this week Spanish police arrested a half-dozen members of a human trafficking gang that lured four girls from Nigeria to Spain with the promise of jobs but instead forced them into prostitution and kept them there under threat of juju, or voodoo magic retribution.

“The Local,” an English-language Spanish news organization, reported that “Officers rescued four victims and arrested six members of the organization that used juju voodoo rituals to sexually exploit women… The traffickers had put the women through a juju voodoo ritual that used the victims’ fingernails or (hair) and involved animal sacrifice in front of idols in a temple in order to ‘guarantee that the women complied with everything they demanded, under threat of death to them and their families.’”

The women had been taken from Nigeria overland to the Moroccan coast, where they then went by boat to Lanzarote, the easternmost of the Canary Islands. The operation was conducted as part of Spain’s “National Police Plan Against Trafficking in Human Beings for Sexual Exploitation,” launched in 2013.

The girls’ belief in -- and fear of -- powerful magic prevented them from going to authorities. In many countries throughout the world belief in witches is common, and black magic is considered part of everyday life. A 2010 poll of 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa found that over half of the population believe in magic. Witch doctors are consulted not only for healing diseases but also for placing or removing curses, and many Africans fear that witch doctors -- or those who hire them -- have power over their lives and health.

In her book “The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back,” Nicoli Nattrass, director of South Africa’s AIDS and Society Research Unit, notes that there “is a rich South African literature suggesting that many black people believe that HIV may have spiritual causes, notably witchcraft attacks.”

Those who subscribe to this belief system may sincerely fear that they could get AIDS simply by disobeying their pimps and traffickers or going to the police. Whether the traffickers believe in magic or curses is irrelevant; what’s important is that the victims do.

Read more at Discovery News

Albino Toddler in Africa Killed for Witchcraft

A toddler named Yohana Bahati was abducted from his home in northern Tanzania on Feb. 14, taken by two men armed with machetes. Police were called and fears were immediately raised because of the child’s rare genetic disorder, albinism. The condition results in a lack of pigmentation in the hair, skin, and eyes, giving them poor eyesight and extreme sensitivity to light. It also makes its sufferers a target for magic-related murder.

Bahati was soon found several kilometers from his home and the worst fears were realized. As a news article in “The Telegraph” described:

“The mutilated body of an albino toddler has been found in Tanzania with his limbs hacked off, the latest such killing for body parts for witchcraft… police finding the body on Tuesday afternoon in a forest area close to his home. ‘His arms and legs were hacked off,’ regional police chief Joseph Konyo said. The baby’s mother Ester Jonas, aged 30, is in a serious state in (the) hospital with machete cuts to her face and arms after she tried to protect her baby.”

This horrific crime highlights the unusual intersection of magic beliefs, African culture, and government. This is only the latest in a series of albino murders. In Tanzania and Burundi, at least 50 albinos have been murdered for their body parts in recent years according to a 2010 Red Cross report. In November 2009, four people were arrested and sentenced to death in northern Tanzania for killing an albino man to harvest his body parts.

Throughout Africa witch doctors are consulted not only for healing diseases, but also for placing (or removing) magic curses or bringing luck in love or business. The belief and practice of using body parts for magical ritual or benefit is called muti.

Muti murders are particularly brutal, with knives and machetes used to cut and hack off limbs, breasts, and other body parts from their living victims. According to the United Nations albino body parts can sell for around $600 (or about what the average person earns in one year) in Tanzania.

Muti Magic

Earlier this year Tanzanian officials had reportedly banned witch doctors in an effort to prevent further witchcraft-related murders of people with albinism, but magical beliefs are deeply embedded in sub-Saharan cultures. Though the practice of muti specifically is not commonly practiced by witch doctors and traditional healers throughout Africa, it happens often enough (especially in East Africa) that albinos and their families live in constant fear for their lives.

What makes the death of Yohana Bahati especially tragic is his young age (most victims are older children or adults), and also the explanation for why the attacks have been increasing in recent months and may get worse: the use of magic by politicians in Tanzania’s upcoming elections to gain an advantage over their rivals.

As bizarre as it may sound to Westerners, the idea of using magic to gain an edge over an opponent — or for success in business or romance — is routine and commonplace throughout Africa. Witch doctors are hired to cast or remove curses, and if you believe that magic affects your daily life — as many Africans do — then obviously those with the most to gain or lose (such as those vying for public office) want the most powerful magic employed on their behalf.

Read more at Discovery News

'Witchcraft' Used to Fight Sex Trafficking in Africa

The British government is using a powerful new tool in its efforts to end sex trafficking and slavery in Africa: witchcraft — or at least belief in magic.

“The Independent” newspaper recently revealed an innovative method to help West African women who have been forced into sex trafficking:

“Britain’s anti-slavery commissioner is examining radical new plans to prosecute sex traffickers by ‘reversing’ the juju spells that terrorize many of their victims into staying silent. More than 100 Nigerian women were identified last year as having been trafficked into sexual slavery with their obedience ensured by magic rituals that threaten them with infertility or death if they reveal what has happened to them.” 
“The level of terror instilled by juju led British police to spend two years trying to dispel the fears of women so they could give evidence in the first case of its kind in Europe, in 2011.”

The victims are often reluctant to testify in court against those who abducted and forced them into prostitution, in part because of fear of magical retribution. Kevin Hyland, England’s first anti-slavery commissioner has been in contact with anti-trafficking officials in Nigeria who have located witch doctors believed to have placed curses on the victims and forced them to remove the curse or face criminal prosecution.

Using magic — or, more accurately, belief in magic — as a way to stem human trafficking is not only a novel idea, but likely a very effective one. Belief in the power of magic is very strong throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, and many live under the (real or perceived) threat of magical retribution, and the fear that witch doctors — or those who hire them — have power over their fortunes, health and lives. In some cases belief in magic helps spread AIDS in Africa.

Measures that fail to address the victims’ underlying belief system are unlikely to be successful because to the extent that a problem is psychosomatic, the root of the problem will be ignored. It is not helpful for a psychologist to simply tell an obsessive-compulsive sufferer, for example, that he doesn’t have to open and close his front door seven times before entering his home; he will still feel the compulsion to do so regardless of any arguments or evidence that it’s unnecessary.

Disordered thoughts and compulsions can be dampened by medication, but at the end of the day what’s needed to address the root of the problem is a new way of framing or understanding the issue. If the Nigerian women truly believe that they have been cursed, no amount of denying or debunking — especially by foreign British doctors — will convince them otherwise: You have to fight fire with fire, or magic with magic.

Curses and Placebos

Belief in the power of curses is a form of placebo effect, which only works if the patient believes it’s effective. The power of the placebo is strong indeed; it can give pain medications a boost, and even enhance athletic performance; recent research revealed that runners who (wrongly) believed that they were performing with doped blood run faster than they thought they could.

Belief in curses and evil spirits caused singer Olivia Newton-John to have a blessing or cleansing ritual performed on a Florida home she was selling; she was concerned that potential buyers might be scared off by the spirit of a man who’d committed suicide there.

While the idea of curses may seem antiquated or confined to the poor and superstitious Third World, that is not the case. Plenty of wealthy and educated Americans believe in curses, and in fact it is not unusual for self-proclaimed psychics to con their clients into believing that a curse has been placed upon them, and that the psychic can help remove the curse — for a fee, of course.

Read more at Discovery News

Tailored flexible illusion coatings hide objects from detection

Developing the cloak of invisibility would be wonderful, but sometimes simply making an object appear to be something else will do the trick, according to Penn State electrical engineers.

"Previous attempts at cloaking using a single metasurface layer were restricted to very small-sized objects," said Zhi Hao Jiang, postdoctoral fellow in electrical engineering, Penn State. "Also, the act of cloaking would prevent an enclosed antenna or sensor from communicating with the outside world."

Jiang and Douglas H. Werner, John L. and Genevieve H. McCain Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering, developed a metamaterial coating with a negligible thickness that allows coated objects to function normally while appearing as something other than what they really are, or even completely disappearing. They report their research in Advanced Functional Materials.

The researchers employ what they call "illusion coatings," coatings made up of a thin flexible substrate with copper patterns designed to create the desired result. They can take a practical size metal antenna or sensor, coat it with the patterned film and when the device is probed by a radio frequency source, the scattering signature of the enclosed object will appear to be that of a prescribed dielectric material like silicon or Teflon. Conversely, with the proper pattern, they can coat a dielectric and it will scatter electromagnetic waves the same as if it were a metal object.

"The demonstrated illusion/cloaking coating is a lightweight two-dimensional metasurface, not a bulky three-dimensional metasurface," said Werner.

The researchers take the object they want cloaked and surround it with a spacer, either air or foam. They then apply the ultrathin layer of dielectric with copper patterning designed for the wavelengths they wish to cloak. In this way, antennae and sensors could be made invisible or deceptive to remote inspection.

Another application of this material would be to protect objects from other emitting objects nearby while still allowing electromagnetic communication between them. This was not possible with the conventional transformation optics-based cloaking method because the cloaking mechanism electromagnetically blocked the cloaked object from the outside, but this new coating allows the object surrounded to continue working while being protected. In an array of antennae, for example, interference from the nearby antennas can be suppressed.

The metasurface coating consists of a series of copper, geometric patterns placed on a flexible substrate using standard lithographic methods currently used to create printed circuit boards. Each illusion coating must be designed for the specific application, but the designs are optimized mathematically. This method of manufacture is low cost and well established.

Another advantage of this method is that it works not only for direct hits by radio frequency waves incident normally on the coated object, but also continues to operate properly within a 20 degree field of view, making it a better angle-tolerant shield than previous attempts that employed bulky metamaterials. Currently, the metasurface coatings only work on narrow bands of the spectrum for any application, but can be adapted to work in other bands of the electromagnetic spectrum including the visible spectrum.

Read more at Science Daily

Magic Trick Offers Insight Into Neuroscience

By studying a magic trick that has been around for thousands of years, neuroscientists have shed light on human attention and visual systems -- as well as on the trick, itself.

"Magicians, in particular, are very intellectual performance artists. They are very interested in the mind and how behavior happens," Dr. Stephen Macknik, director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute(BNI), told Discovery News. "What scientists are doing when we study perception is pretty much the same thing, except we're using the scientific method."

The hope is that magicians' intuitive insight could help instruct the field of neuroscience and perhaps, even be applied in medicine to help people with attention deficit issues.

In their study, recently published in the inaugural issue of PeerJ, the researchers focused upon a famous trick by a pair of very famous magicians. Penn & Teller's 10-year run at The Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino has made them one of the longest-running and most beloved acts in Las Vegas history.

Their trick, "Cups and Balls," is a classic illusion performed by Roman magicians as far back as 2,000 years ago when gladiators still battled in the Colosseum.

Read more at Discovery News

Why Magicians Are a Scientist’s Best Friend

A magician will instantly see the truth behind any colleague’s illusion. But we have a bit of an advantage: We know we are being fooled. Scientists are instinctive doubters who employ a rigorous method to zero in on the truth, but they aren’t necessarily trained to expect deception by subjects and collaborators.

We can’t make magicians out of scientists — we wouldn’t want to — but we can help scientists “think in the groove” — think like a magician. And we should.

For most of my life I’ve pecked away at a certain type of swindler: faith-healers, mystics, mind-readers. Those of a certain age may remember my appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson — a skilled amateur magician himself who introduced my exposure of flummery to a huge television audience.

Mine was a lonely voice back then, but I’m not alone anymore. The immensely talented and popular Penn & Teller long ago joined me as foes of harmful deception, along with other magicians; the president of my foundation, D.J. Grothe, has a background in magic, and many of our associates are professional magicians, as well. They all agree with me that the Society of American Magicians and the International Brotherhood of Magicians should re-establish their once very active investigations of the fakers who claim supernatural powers.

It’s not something that is generally done, or maybe at all – I’d love to see one funding grant that has a line item for the services of a magician, if somebody out there has one. But it is long overdue that my peers in the conjuring profession try to take a more active role in the elimination of nonsense science by joining forces with scientists, and that scientists be open to the proposition.

Please bear with me while I offer you a peek behind the curtain, a cursory glance at what we magicians are — and aren’t. First, we’re entertainers, actors, showbiz people who have as our primary objective the delight of our audiences. We’re deceivers, yes, taking on roles and characters to express our art, just as any actor does.

We are not scientists — with a few rare but important exceptions, like Ray Hyman and Richard Wiseman. But our highly specific expertise comes from knowledge of the ways in which our audiences can be led to quite false conclusions by calculated means — psychological, physical and especially sensory, visual being rather paramount since it has such a range of variety.

The fact that ours is a concealed art as well as one designed to confound persons of average and advanced thinking skills — our typical audience — makes it rather immune to ordinary analysis or solutions.

I’ve observed that scientists tend to think and perceive logically by using their training and observational skills — of course — and are thus often psychologically insulated from the possibility that there might be chicanery at work. This is where magicians can come in. No matter how well educated, or how basically intelligent, trained, or observant a scientist may be, s/he may be a poor judge of a methodology employed in deliberate deception.

I particularly like the way our associate, magician and skeptic Jamy Ian Swiss, has expressed this point:

    Any magician worth his salt will tell you that the smarter an audience, the more easily fooled they are. That’s a very counterintuitive idea. But it’s why scientists, for example, get in trouble with psychics and such types. Scientists aren’t trained to study something that’s deceptive. Did you ever hear of a sneaky amoeba? I don’t think so. You know, they don’t get together on the slide and go, “Hey, let’s fool the big guy.”

It’s not a novel notion to call in a trickster for advice. In England, famous magician John Nevil Maskelyne [1839-1917] appeared in a courtroom to demonstrate how spiritualist fakers were working their swindles on vulnerable victims, with great success. French illusionist Gérard Majax and Italy’s Massimo Polidoro have repeatedly exposed a variety of swindlers in throughout Europe.

Harry Houdini stood on the floor of the U.S. Congress and stridently denounced a variety of hoaxers, flaunting his cash prize for an example of a supernatural feat that would prove him wrong. Magicians like Penn & Teller and others have stepped forward to express their expert opinions concerning expensive and wasteful pursuits of chimeras.

What we need now is to formalize this. We magicians have to make it clear that the insights we need to be magicians can be leveraged in the scientific method, and that we are on call. And scientists have to be open to the idea that a magician just might be the most important research associate on the team when it comes to looking into anomalous claims.

Read more at Wired Science