Study points finger at Cuban crickets

A noise heard by US diplomats in Cuba who suffered mysterious brain injuries came not from technological weapons but local crickets, a new study suggests.

In late 2016, US diplomats in Havana began to report ear pain and other symptoms from a high-frequency noise, leading Washington to withdraw half its embassy staff and to expel Cuban diplomats in retaliation.

But a study by two biologists assessed a purported recording of the noise and said it matched the mating song of the Indies short-tailed cricket found around the Caribbean.

The actual cause of the diplomats' ailments was outside the scope of the study, with the researchers not ruling out that the diplomats suffered a sonic attack at another point.

"While disconcerting, the mysterious sounds in Cuba are not physically dangerous and do not constitute a sonic attack," said the study by Alexander Stubbs, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and Fernando Montealegre-Zapata, a professor of sensory biology at the University of Lincoln in Britain.