Here it is, Friday already, and there’s some pretty amazing science going on the world today, so I thought I’d share some of it with you nice folks.

A North Carolina company called Freer Logic has come out with a remarkable gadget called the Bodywave which you strap to an arm or a leg and which monitors your brainwaves in order to steer you towards a more focused mental attitude. The idea is to train people to be more aware of their awareness level and eventually learn to become focused and alert at will.

First off, the fact that can read your brainwaves via a device strapped to your arm or leg is pretty remarkable in and of itself. Figuring out that your entire body pulses in time with your brain cycles was a pretty sharp insight, and making it work on a consumer electronics level is nothing short of spectacular. It strikes me as something that could have a lot of uses outside this product.

But it’s the product itself that is the star here. The idea of a device which uses biofeedback to artificially expand and enhance one’s metacognitive functions just plain blows my mind. I’m burning with curiosity about the long term psychological effects of this self-calming technique. Would some people people psychologically dependent on the device, clinging to it for its calming effects eyond what would be medically effective? Would others come to resent it, even hate it, for judging their thoughts with such cold and impartial finality? The very notion of introducing an electronic device into the mind’s self-correcting regulatory process, an entirely external factor, is just plain astonishing.

What’s next? One that teaches you to make yourself happy?

In other medical type news, China is poised to be able to mass produce what might just be the big trend of the future : a substance known as light water.

Now if you’re like me, your first reach to that phrase is “What the heck is light water? Besides, obviously, the logical opposite of heavy water?” After all, water is already pretty light in a lot of sense. Old jokes about the health conscious paying for “diet water” spring to mind.

And as it turns out, it really is the opposite of heavy water. It turns out that regular old tap water, the kind you and I drink every day and which is in everything we eat and drink, contains very small amounts of heavy water. That’s water in which the hydrogen is not regular old friendly hydrogen, with one electron and one proton, but deuterium, sometimes called heavy hydrogen, in which that proton and electron have been joined by a neutron, vastly increasing its mass (hence, heavy) and making it an unstable isotope.

So light water is simply water with that small amount of heavy water removed. Supposedly, there is a not insignificant number of medical studies suggesting that light water has a number of health benefits, boosting the immune system, promoting longer life in terminal cancer patients, and so on. Current methods for taking the heavy out of our water are expensive, complex, and difficult.

But China has hit upon a simpler method using a platinum catalyst that could make mass producing light water a reality. And seeing as people are already quite used to paying for bottled water, imagine how much they would be willing to be pay for light water?

And after all, it seems entirely plausible that water free of unstable isotopes is more healthy. That’s why I don’t trust it. It seems a little too plausible, a little too much like the exact sort of thing that would uses its patina of scientific plausibility to fool people who would normally be a little too skeptical to fall for such hocus pocus magical thinking.

I mean sure, it sounds plausible. Even reasonable. But that doesn’t mean it works. For all we know, the tiny amount of heavy water in our drinking water is harmless, or worse, highly necessary for our long term health for some reason we cannot even guess without our current knowledge.

I’m not going to buy into this light water is healthy idea unless there is some serious, cautious, rigorous study into how, exactly, getting the heavy out of water makes it more healthy. Not just correspondence studies that say “well, we did X and Y happened”. Those are too easily misconstrued, cherry-picked, or otherwise used to mean something that they do not actually prove.

I’m talking studies that actual explore and explain how the effect works.

Until then, I’ll consider this just so much health food industry voodoo.

Finally, and most amazingly, a potentially epoch-making event in medical science occurred recently : doctors were able to treat a previously untreatable and very sick boy through decoding his genome.

The poor boy has been extremely ill with a radically inflamed intestinal tract since he was a toddler. He has had around a hundred operations to try to treat it, including the removal of his colon, and doctors were at a complete loss as to what was wrong with the boy and how on Earth to treat him.

The situation was getting desperate, so it was time for radical and novel solutions. They sequenced the boy’s entire genome and searched it for mutations. Once they found the mutation, they were able to arrange a bone marrow transplant using umbilical cord blood, and that brought the poor boy back from the brink of oblivion.

It’s not a miracle cure, and genome sequencing is still a very expensive and complicated process, but in the future, it might well be that we all have a copy of our very own personal genome map attached to our medical files, the sequencing done once a year to check for any deviations, and this could lead to a quantum leap in the treatment of the many diseases which are either entirely genetic or have a genetic component to their pathology.

In the future, we might very well be able to write-protect our DNA.