Today comes at the end of one hell of a week for mind-bending (and mind-reading!) science. I have had a hell of a time narrowing the field down to only the most neuron-tingling ganglion-tickling future-tastic stories for your edification and stimulation this week.

I mean, take this story about the latest development in the field of rapid prototyping or 3D printing : assault rifle parts, and a freaking Stradivarius!

We will deal with the Strad first. Yes, it happened. Some people took a super precise scan of a genuine Stradivarius violin, the greatest violins ever made, and then someone else printed it out and gave it a try.

How did it sound? You be the judge.

I love the setting. Music in a meadow. Lovely.

As for the sound, it sounds fine to me, but then again what do I know? But nobody is claiming it’s just like the real thing. For one thing, it’s made of industrial plastics, not wood and varnish and so on. It is more the idea of it that is important, the idea that some day, rare and precious objects might well be only a few mouse clicks away.

And also rare and dangerous things. An assault rifle is a highly precise machine, and yet people are taking them apart and scanning parts of them and putting them up on the Internet. We’re far from being able to print our own AK-47s (where would the cordite come from, for one) but the real issue is that the precisely machined, painstakingly designed parts of a modern assault rifle represent thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars of research and development, and a future in which anyone can get that for free from the Net is a very different kind of future indeed.

Or how about this? Some highly clever people have come up with a highly promising design for a perpetual hydrogen fuel cell that requires only salt water and fresh water to keep on making hydrogen microbially potentially forever.

I am still not entirely sold on the idea of a hydrogen future, but something like this could certainly make it more of a possibility. The technical details are neat but complicated, but all you need to know is that as long as you have salt water in one side and fresh water in the other, the salinity difference between the two gives the setup the extra juice it needs to keep the microbes happily eating waste and farting out hydrogen.

Yes…. the future may be powered by germ farts. Deal with it.

But neither of those can hold a metaphorical candle, or a real one for that matter (news stories have no hands), to this freaky bit of brain science : the first glimpse into a machine than can actually read your mind and display what you are seeing on a TV screen.

Holy Sixties Science Fiction, man.

Because this is the first good result, the images produced don’t look a whole lot like what the person is actually seeing, but they look enough like it to give anyone the willies.

Check this shit out, kiddies :

Clearly, while nobody would want to watch the reconstruction, it’s only a matter of refining the process before you are getting clearly recognizable images from inside someone’s brain.

This is the sort of science that both blows my mind and scares the shit out of me.

On the positive side, I imagine a future where someone (maybe even someone like little old me) could make a whole movie simply by imagining the images in their mind. And if they can do images, would sound be far behind?

On the negative side, reading someone’s mind is the ultimate violation of privacy imaginable. Even in the most repressive fascist states, despite all their efforts, they could not control what went on inside someone’s mind. In your mind, you were free.

In the future, maybe, not so much.

But as thrilling as that is, for sheer wondrous WTF-ness, nothing beats the big news out of CERN that recent routine neutrino experiments seem to show neutrons moving faster than the speed of light.

Gee, Mister Einstein, isn’t that impossible?

Admittedly, this story is a few days old now, and by now, they might well have figured that it was all a case of human error, instrument malfunction, or something else that is completely mundane and stupid and absolutely no fun whatsoever.

But I am hoping against hope that this is totally real and we have just broken one of the biggest rules in physics and a whole new theory will be needed to account for this, because I am the sort of person who is absolutely thrilled by the discovery of the unknown and the moments when we, as a curious species, are forced to go “What the fuh…. this makes no sense at all!” and throw our hands in the air and admit we don’t know everything.

Plus hey, if neutrons can go faster than light, maybe we can too, and what kind of science fiction guy would I be if I was not super excited at the prospect of real, actual FTL?

But mostly, I just love the edges of knowledge, and am thrilled by the discovery of big, fat, juicy mysteries that reveal the majesty and wonder of the universe, and remind us that we are but children in this big complicated universe.

Dark matter. Dark energy. The universe’s expansion speeding up. And now neutrons moving faster than the speed of light.

The whole thing makes me downright giddy. It makes me want to laugh and laugh and shout “We don’t know anything! Isn’t it wonderful?”

I imagine others would be more angered or disturbed by this sort of thing. But for a thinker like me, it is the most marvelous thing in the world : a genuine mystery.

Ain’t science neat?