Here we are again, whang ban kerpow, at Science Day! I have a basket of science goodies for you, Grandma, and they can keep use safe from those Big Bad Wolves of ignorance and boredom.

So let’s open up this gift basket of wonders and see what the always tasty world of science has for us to feast upon today!

First, we have scientific proof of what we cat lovers have known all along : cats don’t actually ignore us.

Or at least, the scientists seem to be on their way to what I already know about cats. They get the idea that cats communicate in more subtle ways than humans or dogs. But they are missing a key fact.

Cats view direct staring as a challenge. Cats are not looking to challenge us. So they do not look directly at us, because to them, that would be rude and disrespectful. Ergo, cats rarely look us in the eye, so to speak, and to some people, that looks like they are ignoring you.

But they are not. They are respecting you. Watch cats interact with each other and you will see this in action. Cats who are the best of friends will “ignore” each other too.

So when your cat seems to be ignoring you, they are just treating you like a cat. One they like.

On the domestic front, we have NeverWet, the superhydrophobic coating.

I have been waiting for the new science of making substances that repel water with a vengeance to bear consumer fruit, and it looks like it finally has.

Check out this video of the stuff in action :

Imagine having clothes that simply never stain. Fluids just slide right off it. And it’s not just for home use, either. I am sure there must be myriad medical and industrial uses for the least sticky substance in the world (once it’s dry).

For instance, how about bandages that never stick to the wound?

Next up, a spooky development : a program that can tell you if a screenplay will make a hit movie or not!

It’s a simple enough concept. Take a whole whack of scripts. Break them down into their various elements. Compare said elements with box office success. Analyze new scripts based on that comparison.

As a writer, I should be horrified by this. But as a science fan, I just find it too damned interesting to be really upset by it.

After all, once writers know about this program, they can just be sure to include all the things it likes in their screenplays and then all new scripts will rate highly and they will be back to having to decide whether a script is actually good or not.

Besides, in the future, we will all be too bust playing with our desktop particle accelerators to care!

I mean, check this shit out :

“We have accelerated about half a billion electrons to 2 gigaelectronvolts over a distance of about 1 inch,” said Mike Downer, professor of physics in the College of Natural Sciences. “Until now that degree of energy and focus has required a conventional accelerator that stretches more than the length of two football fields. It’s a downsizing of a factor of approximately 10,000.”

Holy crabcakes, that’s amazing! This cannot help but transform the world of particle physics. Even small universities will be able to afford a particle accelerator that normally would be massive, expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and a huge drain on local resources.

Now it will be roughly the size of a large microwave oven, or a good sized centrifuge.

You could have three!

Next, huge news from the field of medicine : a cause for fibromyalgia has been found!

That has got to be a massive relief for fibromyalgia sufferers, who have had to endure decades upon decades of suffering from a life-changing illness that science could not detect. They have had to endure being told it was all in their heads, that they were just faking for attention, and so forth.

Now they can point to this study and say “See, it’s real!”. As a sufferer from another “phantom illness”, namely Irritable Bowel Syndrome, I am ecstatic for my fellows in suffering.

It took a long time for the medical world to accept that IBS was a real thing. Of course now, it’s quite well established. But for many years, we too suffered in silence.

Hopefully, this development will allow medical science to come up with swift and effective treatments for this painful disorder.

And finally, the Big Story of this week, 3D printing with your mind.

I am not kidding. Someone at the Satiago Makerspace came up with a way to design printable 3D objects using only your mind, and technology is so simple even a four year old child can use it.

And that’s not a coincidence. The inventor want to make something that would let his four year old design toys and print them.

And how it works is truly fantastic. Basically, you wear a helmet that can read your brain’s electrical activity. You are presented with various shapes, and the helmet monitors your mind, and registered what shapes make you happy or excited, and which make you unhappy or bored.

The favored ones get bigger, the unhappy ones get smaller, and by this process your child could design their own monster, piece by piece.

The idea of emotion-driven design simply blows my mind. The very idea of such a pure connection to art makes me dizzy.

But even more, it makes me wonder what kind of art could come from a more sophisticated version of this. After all, it measures emotions, not thought, and who is in total control of their emotions? You could end up with art that expressed the artist’s inner state far better than they ever intended and hence break extraordinary new ground in expressionism alone.

And sure, you could probably do practical stuff with it too, I suppose.

But it’s the art that draws me.

Seeya next week, folks!

OH MY GOD the amount of amazing science stories that came along this week! Narrowing it down to just six from a field of twenty has been exhausting.

First off, a rare thing for this column : a video.

Now we have dealt with the concept of teaching your immune system to hate cancer before, but I thought the video was just so well made and so touching that I just had to share it with my fellow science fans.

To think they took a little six year old girl who was inches from death’s door and not only saved her live but completely cured her… it’s positively miraculous.

We might actually be witnessing the dawn of a future without cancer. One where a cancer diagnosis is not the profound life-altering shock that it is today, but just a nuisance that means spending a couple of days in the hospital feeling really sick.

And that’s only if the cancer has already spread all over your body. Presumably, less advanced stages would have less of an immune reaction.

Maybe some day, we will be telling our children about cancer like Depression era people talk about polio.

Another potential miracle : converting biomass directly into fuel/a>.

Next up, this surprising headline : New Structure Found in the Cornea.

When I saw that headline for the first time, I did a double-take and says “Really?”, because you just do not hear about finding new structures in the human body any more.

The age of the anatomist is long passed, and one just naturally assumes that on a strictly parts level, we know all there is to know about the human body.

But this fellow, Dua, has found a sixth layer of the cornea that nobody knew existed until now. It is being called, appropriately enough, Dua’s Layer, and its discovery will hopefully lead to better outcomes for things like corneal transplants.

Way to go, Dua!

Out next item strikes close to home for yours truly : software coaches for social phobia treatment.

The idea of using software to aid in the tried and true “graduated exposure” therapeutic model is not a new one. A lot of other phobias have been treated this way for at least twenty years. The software lets the patient control the experience (“OK, show me the picture of the spider for… one second!”) and thus makes them feel more confident in their own ability to overcome said phobia.

But social phobias are a whole new level of complexity because us social apes have such complex mental hardware to read and interpret the social cues of others that you need a pretty sophisticated understanding of it all to even attempt to simulate social exposure.

It should work, though. I can see the graduations as starting with simulated (or controlled) text interactions, then picture chat, then interacting with an animated avatar, and finally to interacting with another live human, one just in the next room perhaps,via video.

And then on to direct reality, of course. Being social phobic myself, I can state that I can see this being a lot of help in building up my social confidence.

Oh, and it could prove invaluable for treating autism spectrum disorders as well.

Moving on. Remember holograms? They were so cool. Science fiction led us to believe that we would all be watching 3D TV by now, where the action looks like it is really happening inside your television “tank”.

Well, we might be getting there at last, because MIT engineers have come up with a brand new way to make holograms that is far less limited and expensive than before.

The secret is a new kind of spatial light modulator (the thing that makes 3D pixels in space) (also, AWESOME NAME) that is far cheaper to make and far more flexible than previous models.

I mean, check this out :

“It is now possible… to make holographic video monitors with full-colour, standard video resolution and a 30Hz (hertz) refresh rate.”

And all for roughly 500 bucks American! I can’t wait.

But where will we store all that 3D information? Why, on our brand new 1 petabyte (aka 1000 terabyte) DVD-R’s, of course.

I shitteth thee not! And to do it, they had to find a way to hack a previously set in stone physical law concerning the nature of light called Abbe’s Law.

Abbe’s Law states that you can’t focus a beam of light down any narrower than half the light’s wavelength. This has, until now, put a hard limit as to how small the encoded bits on optical media could be, and hence, limited data density.

But via some clever manipulation of light using two lasers at once, it is possible to get a beam of light that is functionally much smaller than Abbe’s Law would dictate, and thus data densities of simply staggering proportions are now possible.

According to the developers, one of their hyper-DVDs could hold 10.6 years of compressed video, or 50,000 full length high definition uncompressed movies.

Are you thinking what I am thinking, Pinky? I think so, Brain : entire television series on a single disc! Not to mention what that would do to personal computing data storage space, although theoretically we are all on “the cloud” now so that is not really an issue.

Yeah, well, you’ll pry my hard drive from my cold, dead hands.

That’s it for this week, folks. I was going to tell you about a plant that eats sheep, but it is too damned depressing to think about.

See you next week!

It’s SCIENCE TIME, kids! So boot up your tablets, stick your earphones in your ear holes, drink your Special Science Drink (With Extra Science), put your amazing Thinking Cap of Science on, and get ready for some of the coolest science news from the last week.

Everybody ready? Then LET’S GO!

First, let’s get this out of the way : scientists claim to have found evidence of other universes.

They did it by studying the cosmic background radiation that is commonly referred to as the last echoes of the Big Bang. They found circular areas in the texture (so to speak) of this radiation that they say are evidence of our universe having “collided” with others and left a “bruise”.

Color me very skeptical. To me, this is when astrophysics turns into metaphysics, and I am reluctant to accept such indirect evidence for such an extraordinary claim.

Isn’t one universe enough?

Much cooler : great news for the future of graphene.

Graphene is a substance consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a lattice. It has the potential to be the strongest substance ever created, but only if it lacks defects.

Before now, the only way to get graphene was to pore over a graphite crystal to find areas of graphene and then peel them off. Not the sort of thing that scales up to industrial production levels.

But now, a team has worked some of the kinks out of another method called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), which basically stitches together smaller bits of graphene into a larger sheet.

The main kick was that the graphene was much weaker along the joins, rendering it basically useless. But now, a team has figured out that this damage to the structure was caused by the chemical used to peel the graphene off the substrate where it formed.

With a new chemical, graphene is back. The CVD graphene is just as strong as the flaked kind. How strong?

…so strong that, as Hone observed, “it would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap.”

So much for the nice clean physics portion. After this, it’s all organic!

First up, vat grown meat is a reality.

A Dutch team has created artificially grown hamburger for the first time in history. It’s not cheap… the project cost around $300K. But it could just open the door to a future where humans can eat all the meat they like, knowing that no animals died to produce it.

I’m quite keen on the idea. Not only is it a moral gain, but it could be a massive efficiency gain as well. Right now, raising animals for meat is one of the most inefficient ways to create food.

But in a vat-grown meat future, meat will be grown almost like any other crop, and people all over the world may then be able to afford it.

And that could change things for the bottom billion like nothing else that came before.

Next up, a unusual way to gauge brain health : by looking at your retinas.

The theory is that the width of the blood vessels in a patient’s retinas are a good indicator for how healthy the ones inside the brain are as well. Counterintuitively, the wider the blood vessels, the more likely it is that the brain behind those eyes is unwell.

Individuals who had wider retinal venules showed evidence of general cognitive deficits, with lower scores on numerous measures of neurospsychological functioning, including verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and executive function.

I suppose the theory is that wide blood vessels would by less efficient at getting to every single cell in the brain, and thus drag the efficiency of the entire brain down.

So next time someone is looking deeply into your eyes, it might not be love.

They might just be trying to figure out if you’re retarded.

And the medical news just keeps coming : we are one step closer to a lab grown liver.

It is a crucial step. Basically, the problem has been getting liver cells to function in the lab. For some reason, the minute you take the liver cell out of the person, it loses all its functions, making it very hard to study said functions.

All that changed with a paper in the June 2 issue of Nature Chemical Biology that lists a dozen biochemical factors needed to keep those liver cells alive and functional outside the human body.

If this can be extended into getting the liver cells to grow in the lab, then we will be able to apply modern tissue engineering techniques to them and make a patient a brand new liver.

And that would effectively bring an end to liver disease as we know it.

Finally, great news for the hairless : scientists have figured out what signals the body uses to signal the regrowth of hair follicles on wounded skin.

The hope is that with this knowledge, we could come up with a way to encourage the regrowth of hair follicles more or less wherever we want them.

This would be great news for people with various skin conditions like alopecia, but we all know what this is really going to be used for.

Male pattern baldness! Otherwise known as androgenic alopecia.

And I think that is fabulous. I think that male pattern baldness is a cruel disease, one that effects not the victim’s health but their dignity. My father lost all his hair when he was college age, and my brother started balding young too.

Luckily, that particular gene missed me. (Instead I got my father’s weakness versus sunstroke. Fair dinkum. ) But I still want it cured in others.

Well, that is all for this week, science fans! Take off your Science Helmet, put your earphones and your tablet away, wash and recycle the bottle from your Science Drink, and go to bed.

And dream a few big Science Dreams for me!

Hard to believe that another wacky yet wonderful week has gone by already! But here we are at yet another jolly holly Science Day, and here I am with another brace of science stories to march across your mind and put on a bloody good show.

As usual, the hardest part of writing this column was choosing which half-dozen stories to cover out of the score or so potential beauties all vying for your attention.

But after many rounds of competition and a particularly brutal swimsuit round, I can now present you with the six stories that made it to the semi-finals!

First off, a story which I have been dying to talk about since I discovered about, but which I am choosing to do first because it is only somewhat related to science.

It’s about the discovery of literally thousands of cave paintings in Mexico.

4,926 of them, to be precise, in 11 different locations. One cave alone had more than 1500. It is a find simply staggering in scale. It’s like finding a hundred Lascaux’s. The sheer amount of information in this find will be keeping archaeologists, archivists, analysts, and other academics busy for decades.

To me, cave paintings mark the true beginning of culture in the modern sense of the word. I often think about that moment when some caveman (or woman) first looked at some scribble they made and saw… something. Something from their life. A person, an animal, fire, whatever.

That had to be an extraordinary moment for that individual.

Next up, a piece of the Drake’s Equation puzzle : a bacterium that thrives at -15 degrees Celsius.

It’s called Planococcus halocryophilus strain Or1, and it lives in tiny pockets of extremely salty freezing water found inside permafrost.

So the requirement for liquid water remains, of course, but the actual temperature of said water can be as low as fifteen below and life does just fine there. The bacterium was even observed still respiring at -25 degrees Celsius, and might even be able to survive even colder conditions.

This offers concrete proof that the parameters of Drake’s Equation have never been broader, and certainly suggests that life of a sort might exist on that tantalizing neighbor of ours, Mars.

We know there is some water on Mars, and there could certainly be pockets of it that stays liquid due to being very salty and near a volcanic heat source.

And then…. life on Mars!

Our next story is from the frontiers of both genetic science and psychology : scientists have been able to eliminate one form of schizophrenia in mice.

It is the form associated with high levels of activity from a gene called NRG-1. When the mice had high levels of activity from this gene, they exhibited schizophrenia-like symptoms, such as hyperactivity, inability to remember what just happened, and inability to ignore stimuli.

To me, that sounds a lot more like genuine ADHD than schizophrenia, but I suppose it is hard to tell when a mouse is hearing voices or hallucinating.

Only ten percent of schizophrenics have this form of the disease, but still, if a drug could be developed to reduce activity in NRG1 to normal levels, it could provide relief to at least some of the victims of this most mysterious and perplexing organic mental illness.

Reality issues are the hardest to treat.

And now for the wackiest sounding science story of the week : adding spinach to solar panels nearly triples their efficiency.

Yup. You read that right. Spinach. Like what Popeye eats.

Specifically, the photosynthetic protein from spinach, which they sprayed onto silicon and discovered made for a current 2.5 times stronger than your more typical solar cell.

That is an impressive enough result by itself. With solar, it has always been about the efficiency : how much current per square inch of solar cell. That is the vital statistic determining how well solar can compete with other, dirtier and less sustainable ways of generating electricity.

It seems odd to me that this spinach thing works, though, because I always assume photosynthesis produced glucose, not electricity.

But perhaps the role of the chlorophyll is to focus energy that is then used to synthesize the glucose.

Who knows? Maybe another plant does it even better!

And if you think that’s impressive, scope this, junior scientists : a team in Scotland has gotten the go-ahead to start testing artificial blood from stem cells!

First, a vocab check : in this case, “artificial” means “not generated by the human body”. These would be human blood cells identical to the ones currently moving stuff about inside all of us. They would just have begun their lives as harvested stem cells instead of inside your bone marrow.

And obviously, being able to mass-produce human blood would be a simply massive medical achievement, especially if it is cheap. No more blood drives, no more running out of blood in the OR, and just think of the progress that could be made against blood-borne illnesses and other blood diseases.

Not to mention the impact on the vampire community. For them, it would be nothing less than revolutionary.

No more cow’s blood for Nick!

And finally, what story gets Pride of Place this week? Well, sad to say, I was a little self-indulgent this week. This is not the most important or world-shaking story, just the one I found most interesting.

Turns out there is a strange movement afoot amongst the young male nerds of today, and it all revolves around a substance called Soylent.

It’s not people.

Instead, it’s an open-source attempt to create a drink that supplies all that your body needs as the ultimate in meal replacement.

Its inventor, Rob Rheinhart (great name), describes it thus :

I researched every substance the body needs to survive, plus a few extras shown to be beneficial, and purchased all of them in nearly raw chemical form from a variety of sources… The first morning my kitchen looked more like a chemistry lab than a cookery, but I eventually ended up with an thick, odorless, beige liquid. I call it ‘Soylent’.

At this point, I have to separate my artistic/aesthetic side from my scientist side.

My artistic/aesthetic side find the entire idea utterly repulsive. Only programmers and engineers would want to eliminate eating and consider that a triumph of “efficiency”.

I mean, you know this guy has the wrong end of the stick when he declare’s Soylent’s taste to be “irrelevant”, when it’s the first thing anything wants to know about the damned stuff.

Still, scientifically, I find the attempt quite interesting. I have wondered for a long time why there could not be a single nutritionally perfect diet supplement that would provide everything your body needs so that you would not have to worry about nutrition at all.

And as far as I can tell, Soylent is pretty close. It needs roughage, and something to make it taste good, or it will not get the job done.

Nobody wants to drink something that tastes awful and gives them diarrhea. (Well, except engineers.)

But there’s no reason why sufficient roughage couldn’t be added to keep one regular, and we have some pretty strong and yet healthy artificial flavours and sweeteners to make it taste good.

I still don’t think an all-liquid diet is a good idea. But there is no reason why you could not use Soylent as your dietary supplement, like a multivitamin, then eat whatever you like, secure in the knowledge that you have your nutritional needs covered.

And anecdotally, at least, it seems to make people feel amazingly good, which is exactly what I would expect would happen if your body is finally getting everything it needs.

Most people in modern life are suffering from a host of nutritional deficiencies without even knowing it. A lot of modern malaise might well stem from, ironically enough, malnutrition.

And anything that can end that has my vote of approval.

Seeya next week folks!

Guess what, science fans! It’s SCIENCE TIME again!

And this time, we will be doing our science roundup in two parts : non brain science, and….

…wait for it, wait for it…

….actual brain science.

No extra points for getting that right so you can all put your hands down now.

Our first brain unrelated items comes from the fascinating world of DNA and the almost as fascinating world of carnivorous plants.

It turns out that recent developments in sequencing the genome of a plant called Utricularia gibba (or “Uggie”, to its friends) have yielded some very interesting results.

Turns out that Uggie baby’s genome consists of 97 percent active genes and only three percent “junk” DNA that doesn’t code for any proteins.

This is a sharp contrast to us naked beach apes, whose genome consists of only 2 percent active DNA and 98 percent rubbish DNA that just lays about without coding a single protein.

Thus, the puck is pushed back into the “junk DNA truly is useless” end of the rink and away from the “junk DNA is somehow very important even though it codes for no proteins” side of things. After all, it seems you can at least have a complex multicellular plant with almost no junk DNA.

The article (and the research) assumes that Uggie has somehow “deleted” nearly all junk DNA but I consider that assumption unwarranted. It may never have had junk in its DNA sequence in the first place, in which case the question is, why does any species have junk DNA?

My armchair scientist theory is that adding new DNA without getting rid of the old and just changing which genes are active allows for a faster rate of stable mutation and hence benefits species which have had to adapt to various conditions, like people, or our food crops.

Next up in the brainless science field (so to speak), we have this story of a natural reservoir with billion year old water in it recently discovered in Ontario.

Scientists found it while working 2.4 km under the ground and chemical and isotope analysis show that the water in this underground lake has definitely not been in contact with Earth’s atmosphere for at least a billion years, and is abundant with hydrogen and methane, two of the building blocks of life.

This is exciting news because it means that somewhere in that reservoir may be life that has not been part of Earth’s surface biosphere for a billion years. Who knows what strange and previously unheard of avenues of evolution such life could take?

It might even be its own shadow ecosystem that works on different principles than our own.

However, don’t expect anything multicellular, as I can’t imagine what the energy inputs for an ecosystem like that would be. Chemical? Geothermal? Who knows.

For those of us in the primary biosphere, it’s sunlight.

OK, now on with the brain science!

First off, we will talk about recent progress made in the scientific understanding of individuality.

A study has shown that mice who explore more develop more new neural connections than ones who do not. This difference in neurogenesis provides an important clue in the mystery of individuality, because all of these mice were genetically identical. Forty mice, all twins.

And yet, there were differences. And the mystery really takes off when you realize that there was differences in behaviour in these genetically identical mice before they even started the study.

So obviously, individuality is not a solely genetic thing. There must be another factor that somehow tells us “you are bold and exploratory” or “you are cautious and neophobic”.

And if that factor is not in our genes, then where the heck is it?

I would like to know if these differences in temperament appear even in genetically identical mice raised in isolation with one another.

It might be that somehow we communicate with others of our species (via pheromones, perhaps) and “negotiate” who has what job in the community.

“You’re already bold and exploratory? OK, I’ll be cautious and sensible. ”

And if that held true in humans, it might be that this genetic negotiation happened when we were all sitting in the maternity ward together.

As a distinctly cautious type, that prospect both intrigues and disturbs me.

And now, onward to the edge : University of Oxford scientists think they may have come up with a way to make you better at mental arithmetic.

And all you have to do is train for five days while they use something called transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS) on your brain.

After that, you will have a sharper, faster brain that manipulates numbers more easily than ever before, and the effect will even still be there six months later.

Frankly, this smells a tad off to me. Nowhere in the article does it say there was a control group that had the stimulation without the training, and without that control, you cannot say the transcranial stimulation had anything to do with it.

Maybe five days’ training is all anyone needs to get better at maths.

But who knows? The science of transcranial magnetic stimulation is still quite new. Maybe they are on to something after all.

Still quite spooky to imagine a bunch of kids studying math with brain stimulation helmets on, though.

Plus, this caught my eye because I have had a lovely resurgence of my own mental arithmetic skills lately. I used to be quite food at it as a child but as I grew I somehow lost the ability.

And now it’s back! Wow, I wonder if I can get my old singing voice back too.

On a more serious note, scientists from the University of Adelaide and the University of Colorado have collaborated to create what might just be a cure for heroin and morphine addiction.

Turns out, they both bind to the same receptor in the brain, and the scientists thing they can create a drug that blocks access to those receptors, and thus eliminate the craving for the opiods.

That would certainly shoot the main mechanism of addiction right between the eyes. No cravings, no addiction, basically. And it might even lead to a cure for another serious problem, morphine tolerance.

Patients with long term intractable pain often develop a high level of resistance to morphine and its derivatives, leading to the inevitable point where the only dosage strong enough to stop their pain is one that would be fatal.

If we could cure the cravings for the morphine, we could slow down the development of tolerance and thus give the patient more time where the drug works for them.

And that… would be awesome.

That’s enough for this week, folks! But stay tuned, more brain science soon.

Hey there science fans! We are back with yet another Friday column jam packed with all (well, OK, most) if the hottest, coolest, awesome-est science stories from the past week!

Owing to a new high tech and brilliant (OK, low tech and obvious) new scheme for preserving science stories until they are ripe for the plucking, we have six, count them, SIX, science stories to cover this week, and let me tell you, it was hard enough just whittling it down to six!

Never let it be said that I don’t work hard (OK, moderately firm) for you nice people!

First up, we have some paranoia busting news from the field of microbiology. Turns out, there is a protein in human breast milk that help antibodies fight antibody-resistant diseases.

This protein, rather adorably named HAMLET (for Human Alpha-lactalbumin Made Lethal to Tumor cells.. a little sloppy, I know… hey, I didn’t coin it!), acts as a kind of biological crowbar that pries open resistant strains of diseases like Staphylococcus aureus and makes them vulnerable to antibodies and antibiotics once more.

For those of us who have been getting rather anxious about the current rise of resistant strains of nasty diseases due to our unintentionally applying positive evolutionary pressure on existing strains via vaccines and antibiotics, this is very good news.

The war between humans and germs has been going very well for the last 100 years or so, at least in the developed world, and we have, anti-vax nuts aside, destroyed many terrible scourges that killed millions of people over the centuries.

But the rise of diseases that resist our best efforts to destroy them has put us, to a minor but potentially lethal degree, back where we were in the days of Pasteur.

Anything that can keep that from happening is good news to me.

Also on the front of fighting disease, we have news of a new molecule that kills the bacteria that causes tooth decay.

The molecule is called Keep 32, and it could be showing up in toothpaste and even in sugary foods themselves some time in the near future.

As we all learned in health class, sugar doesn’t cause tooth decay. It just feeds the bacteria, Streptococcus Mutans, that causes tooth decay. It does this by excreting acid all over your teeth which eats through the enamel.

So in theory, if you could kill all the Streptococcus Mutans in your mouth and keep them dead, you could eat whatever you like without fear of cavities.

Makes me wonder how the big gets on your teeth in the first place. Is it floating around in the air we breathe, or the water we drink? Are we born with it there? If you went three weeks without eating anything with any sugar in it, could you starve the little fuckers to death?

Heck, if this stuff is safe enough (big if), we could just add it to the water supply, just like we did with flouride in years gone past, and for pretty much the same reason.

Imagine, a future without tooth decay! (Sorry, dentists!)

Keeping with the Cool Molecule theme, how about a molecule that if injected into your bloodstream allows you to live without breathing?

Is that straight from science fiction, or what? The “martians” in Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan survive on Mars by taking oxygen pills and learning to breathe in a special way. This is not far from that!

The idea is that these microparticles are made of oxygen molecules separated by micro-thin layers of lipids, essentially creating time-release oxygen.

The most immediate use for this would, of course, be medical. There are all kinds of catastrophic medical situations where the patient simply cannot get oxygen from the air, and with these particles in the doctor’s arsenal, they could simply inject them into the patient’s bloodstream and give them a nearly normal blood oxygen level for up to 30 minutes.

That is more than enough time to deal with the issue, or at least get the heart-lung machine hooked up and working, although honestly, with this particle, maybe you wouldn’t even need those any more.

Of course, the fun uses would be things like scuba diving without oxygen tanks, or just really convincingly faking your death to mess with your friends.

Speaking of stuff straight out of science fiction, how about a bionic ear? How about, in face, a 3D printed bionic ear made of your own cells and with the electronics built right in?

Eat your six million dollar heart out, Linday Wagner aka The Bionic Woman! All you had was a souped up hearing aid.

As you all know, the exciting new world of tissue engineering is a fave here at the Friday Science Whatever, so I just had to cover this. And while an ear is not technically all that complicated a thing to reproduce, this is definitely an encouraging first step towards a future where custom printed 3D organs are widely available and any part of our body can simply be replaced if it breaks.

And as someone who will be turning 40 in 9 days, I find that highly reassuring.

Speaking of that rat bastard aging, a highly unusual theory of aging has emerged recently : it turns out that aging might actually be all in your head.

Your hypothalamus, to be exact. An over-activation of a particular protein causes inflammation of the hypothalamus, and that leads to various aging-type symptoms, including inhibiting a protein used to repair nerves.

At least, it does so in rats. This theory seems fairly left-field, but it is actually in line with a lot of the current research about the surprisingly deep and profound role that inflammatory responses in our body in all kinds of disorders, including ones that don’t seem related at all.

To me, blaming all of aging on this one factor seems a tad extreme. Modern medicine knows that aging is not a single process but a number of concurrent but not necessarily related processes.

But this hypothalmic route might provide important clues as to how the whole thing gets started.

Finally, we will talk about something that might help us all live better in this glorious organ-replacement aging-free future : aquaponics.

As the name implies, it is a brilliant synthesis of aquaculture and hydroponics where the ammonia rich waste from the fish becomes nitrogen rich food for the plants, which take the nitrogen out of the water and returns nothing but pure, clean water.

This replaces aquaculture’s constant need for waste disposal and hydroponics’ heavy need for constant nutrient injection. One problem solves the other in a beautiful display of harmonic efficiency.

If we are to feed the world in the future, we will need to go way out of the box in order to create ways to grow food in cities, and a system like this one could very well be the backbone of skyscraper farms of the future. Fresh fish and produce from the same place!

Of course, the biggest threat to a closed recirculating system like this is disease, so it will take very strict monitoring and near quarantine levels of cleanliness to make it work.

Besides that, I wonder how well the system would scale upward. A lot of promising systems produce very high efficiency rates under highly controlled conditions but can’t make the transition to the less tightly controlled world of industrial production.

Still, I am absolutely in love with the efficiency of the whole thing, and I have no problem with the idea of a future in which all our food is produced this way.

As long as it still tastes good and is nutritious, I don’t care how you make it.

That’s all for this week. Ain’t science grand?

Thanks to faithful correspondent William Graham, who shared this link with me, tonight I will be talking about that whole split brain thing that got me so annoyed earlier this week.

But I will be doing it based not on an irritating essay but on this very interesting talk which comes to you from the mind and mouth of renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist and the always amusing and entertaining visuals come from those fancy folks at RSA Animate.

So sit back and get the skinny on what is up with split brain science in this day and age!

It’s a lot clearer than that stupid essay, isn’t it? Yes, the old oversimplifications about language being in one half of the brain or creativity being only in another are long since dead. This, I knew.

But the essay made it sound like we had given up on hemispheric specialization altogether, which is patently absurd, and I am glad Doctor McGilchrist backs me up on that.

I am quite intrigued to find out that in terms of the ration between the corpus callosum and total brain size, our brains have actually grown less connected over our evolutionary history. This suggests that either there was a very good reason why greater separation was needed, or that the evolutionary pressure was for the rest of our brains to grow in size and function and there was not sufficient pressure for our corpus callosum to keep pace.

It might well be that semi-independent cerebral hemispheres are actually far better for abstract reasoning and other higher mental functions than a fully integrated mind. Each hemisphere can concentrate on its specialties most of the time and only pass information in between when it’s needed.

I also had no idea that the hemispheres were not symmetrical. That is highly counterintuitive and as our lecturer points out, there must have been a damned good reason for us to develop in a way that clearly takes up more space and doesn’t fit as well in our symmetrical skulls.

I wish he has followed that up, in fact. I would really liked to know what those parts of the brain do as a clue as to why we might have needed to expand them.

Now we get into the meat of the subject, which is the notion that the hemispheres are divided so that we can both focus in on what we are looking for or doing and still have half our brains dedicated to the sort of ready-for-anything broad focus that monitoring our environment for threats requires.

This makes sense to me. In the state of nature, you cannot afford to get so absorbed in your focus task that you do not notice the predator sneaking up on you. On the other hand, if you are completely unable to focus because every little stimulus from your environment distracts you, you are never going to be able to concentrate well enough to complete complex tasks which require focus like finding food or hunting.

Regarding the specific brain which is typing these words for you to read, I would definitely come down really strongly on the focus half of the equation. I can become entirely absorbed in a book, a video game, a conversation, writing, or even just thinking my own thoughts.

On the other hand, I pay almost no attention to my surroundings. In the state of nature I would be sabretooth chow on my first day out. Even if I was hunting (something I dearly hope I never have to do), I would get so wrapped up in tracking my prey (or just daydreaming) that a wolf could just casually saunter up to me and start chewing on my leg and I wouldn’t even notice until the third bite.

So like I have always thought ever since I learned about this whole split brain stuff, I am left-brained to a very high degree.

I just consider myself fortunate to also have a very good relationship with my subconscious mind and thus also have a great deal of creativity.

My corpus callosum is constantly abuzz with information and reasoning passing between the two hemispheres.

Then we get to the frontal lobe, which from what I gather from McGilchrist functions as our detachment center, the part of the brain that lets us step back from the situation and give our higher reasoning functions a chance to operate, and not just act on instinct or reflex.

If so, one could make the argument that it is a highly human part of the brain. Even our close cousins the chimps do not spend a lot of time thinking about things. They are capable of reasoning, but it is more like the reasoning of an active child who learns by trying things out constantly.

I find it very illuminating to learn that it is my underdeveloped right hemisphere that deals with empathy and connection to others. I wonder what that implies for us left brained types? it seems to me that a lot of us have trouble connecting to others. When it gets really bad, we end up on the autism spectrum, with narrowly focused minds oblivious to larger contexts and unable to even understand the motivations of others on the most basic level.

I suppose the opposite of this would be someone who has amazing interpersonal skills who connects with and relates to others easily, but is confounded by even the simplest of focus tasks like screwing in a light bulb or paying their bills.

I will not get into the philosophical issues McGilchrist gets into nearish the end of his speech. Let’s just say that as a philosopher, McGilchrist makes an excellent psychiatrist.

Human beings have never been freer or happier, Doc. Things have never been better. Don’t let the anecdotal blind you to the big picture. Overall, the human race has never had it so good and the trend is clearly that things will keep improving for at least the near future.

The ride is bumpy, but that doesn’t mean we are not getting anywhere.