Sounds kinky, right?

Well it’s not.

Well, maybe just a little.

I explain masochism.

Maybe I will take on sadism next.

Finally! We’re back with all that wonderful science that has been piling up over the last few weeks.

Truth be told, your science reporter is not at his best today, and was tempted to skip yet another week of wonderful, wonderful science in order to do something a little less arduous.

But I just could not disappoint you science fans for yet another week. So here I am, raring to go and read to plunge into the stack of science stories piled up in my inbox and ferret out the gems.

And it’s all because of you wonderful science Fans!

We’ll start with a small thing that could turn out big : self-cooling windows.

Researchers at Harvard have invented a window that has an ultra-thin vein of water embedded in the pane. The idea is that water from a building’s water supply would come in and absorb heat from the window and then exit the system.

Some of you will recognize this as pretty much the exact same system (but with blood) that animal life (like us) uses in order eliminate excess heat.

The result, so they say, is a window that lets in just as much light, but no heat. This could save people boodles of cash on their air conditioning bills and make for much more temperature-neutral environments for us finicky humans to live in.

I wonder if they could circulate hot water from a building’s hot water supply through in the winter and cut down on heating costs as well?

And speaking of simple but very nifty bits of technology, check out this billboard.

It uses a very simple system to bring fresh, clean water to people who desperately need it. From what I can tell, this sort of thing is cheap to make and very low maintenance, and yet it can mean the difference between life and death for so many people.

Of course, it only works in a coastal desert or other similar high humidity, low rainfall conditions. Those are fairly rare. So it’s not going to solve the world’s drinking water problem by itself.

But for those places, it could change everything. We take clean water for granted because we live in water paradise, where there is almost always enough rain to keep the reservoirs full.

But for billions of people, there is no guarantee there will be any rain at all.

And hey…. moisture farming!

Next up, a story near and dear to this column’s heart : lab grown beef!

Yes, the world’s first lab grown hamburger has taste tested, and the reviews are in.

Two brave souls volunteered to lead the way, and they said it looks like hamburger to them and feels like hamburger to the mouth, but is lacking in flavour.

Any chef could have told them that. Every cook knows that extremely lean hamburger is tasteless. You can get rid of all the clear fat and that actually makes the ground beef taste better.

But the brown fat, that’s where the flavour resides. Get rid of that, and eww.

The scientists say that altering the process to produce a fattier product is no problem, and so the next round of tasting will go better.

And from there, who knows? If they can scale it up, we might have lab grown hamburger in our supermarkets and fast food joints as early as a few years from now.

In other good news, selfish behaviour is not rewarded by evolution.

This despite all those “selfish gene” believers who can’t seem to grasp the fact that nature is jam packed with highly successful species which cooperate with one another, the most successful of which is us, homo sapiens, a species very adept at balancing individual and collective needs.

Clearly, it can be advantageous for an individual to cooperate if said cooperation helps their social group as a whole. The problem with zero-sum economics of selfishness is that does not and cannot include the benefit one gets from being a member of a strong collective.

This makes it seem like cooperation has no benefits, only costs. But if we take the benefits of cooperation into account, it is clear that cooperation can be a very good deal even on just the selfish, amoral level of economics.

And speaking of the selfish and amoral, there is some indications that sociopaths might be able to be taught to empathize after all.

The results are purely based on brain imaging and are hence a little thin, but promising. It turns out that you might be able to turn on a sociopath’s empathy by getting them to imagine themselves in the same situation as someone else.

That activates those vital areas of the brain that we use in order to judge our actions against the consequences to others. We imagine “how we would like it if someone did the same thing to us”.

However, just because a sociopath imagines him or herself in a particular scenario does not mean they actually care about someone else in that situation.

That is the difference between empathy and sympathy. You can feel what another is feeling without caring. It’s just information. You might even think they deserve to feel as they do.

But to sympathize is to care that the person is in distress and want to help, which can be activated almost without empathy because we can understand that another human is in some sort of distress purely from looking at their facial expression, body language, and so on, without having to be able to imagine ourselves in their exact position.

And finally, brace yourself, science fans, because this one is scary as hell : scientists have been able to implant false memories into mice.

The method is a little complicated, and very brain science intensive, but the net effect was that they made these mice react to a benign environment where they had never received a painful stimulus as though it was another one in which it had.

And that’s pretty fucking freaky, n’est-ce pas?

Even a very simple, almost crude result like that becomes damned sinister if you imagine it applied to human beings. All those 60’s science fiction stories about government mind control come roaring back into life if you can imagine that some group could condition you to respond to certain situations, like say an anti-government protest, like you did to another, say the room they tortured you in.

As for anything beyond that, well, then we get into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind territory, if we are lucky, and Total Recall territory (or worse!) if we’re not.

It is a weird time to be a brain science fan. On the one hand, we are discovering more about the human brain than ever before and the insights gained are truly breathtaking.

But the potential uses for these insights honestly scare the hell out of me.

I mean, where do you go if you are not even safe in your own mind?

And with that happy thought, I bid you adieu for another week, science fans!

Keep dreaming the future!