And just like that, it’s Friday again. That week just seemed to blink by, didn’t it? Why, it seems like only yesterday that it was Thursday.

Hmm, maybe that isn’t so mysterious after all.

Welcome back to the Friday Science Whatever, a weekly roundup of all the coolest science stories culled from the vast reaches of the entire Popular Science twitter feed, with occasional exceptions.

What can I say, Pop Sci is such a rich mine of science goodies that I rarely feel the need to go looking elsewhere for this little weekly effort of mine.

This week, we have an alternate theory of the sexual revolution, making cute little birds go psycho, doctors who are like Bill Clinton, and tricking your brain.

First off, we have that dear old friend of mine, the sexual revolution. (So much nicer than all the other revolutions. Way less stabbing.)

The received wisdom on the sexual revolution is that it started with the advent of The Pill (of all the pills in the world, only one gets to be called The Pill), that is, the women’s birth control pill that let a woman have sex whenever she liked without risking pregnancy.

Sounds reasonable. But according to a study written by Emory University economist Andrew Francis, if you crunch the numbers, the sexual revolution really began with rise of penicillin as a cure for syphilis.

This also sounds plausible, but I am not buying it. I am sure that removing the risk of one of the worst diseases known to humanity helped the sexual revolution along. But the real barriers to greater sexual exploration are social and psychological. Physical health risks are usually the last things on people’s minds when their libido is revving hot.

Only worries about social status or being “weird” are enough to contain the libido.

I would also like to point out that the sexual revolution really began (as did so much of modernity) with the suffragettes. They advocated for a free and uninhibited sexuality for women back before women were even considered people. And this freedom from “Eve’s guilt” liberated men as well. They no longer had to feel that their natural male sexual desires made them despoilers of virginal purity and that they were supposed to “do their dirty business” while the women they loved lied back and thought of England.

So honestly, the sexual revolution started before World War I. Take that!

Next up : sparrows. Cute little twittering birds… or psychotic murderers?

Some researchers wanted to check out sparrow aggression, so they took a taxidermied male sparrow and rigged it up so that it could lift a wing in what is apparently a very rude sparrow gesture.

And the live male sparrows in the area freaked the fuck out. They got so mad, in fact, that the experiment had to be halted after one of the enraged male sparrows ripped the dummy sparrow’s head off.

And they seemed so cute when they would huddle around the neighbor’s chimney with their feather fluffed all up, making them look like little fat balls of feathers.

But this is what happens when you experiment with aggression. The combination of a “rude gesture” to prompt aggression with neither enough threat to make another male back down nor the ability to signal submission and end the conflict that way, that robot sparrow was doomed.

Aggression can only be stopped by threat or placation. Without either of those, it just inflames further and further till the other males are completely psychotic with rage.

For a human example, see how right wing types react to Barack Obama. (I will let you figure out what his threat signal is. But here’s a hint : it’s really racist!)

And speaking of liberals who made their opponents go psycho and try to behead them : How is your doctor like Bill Clinton? Because according to one study, he feels your pain.

Through a clever ruse, they convinced some doctors that a placebo treatment really worked, and then got them to administer it while in a FSW fave, an fMRI machine.

This showed that the doctors, especially the ones who self-rated themselves as high on empathy, really did feel pain that almost perfectly mirrored the pain that they imagined their patients (who were really actors) were feeling, and experienced reward and relief when they imagined they were relieving said pain.

This pleases me to hear, and not just because it forms an intersection between two fascinations of mine, brain science and empathy.

I think that understanding our capacity to feel the pain of others as our own is a very important goal in terms of bringing the truth of our nature as a social species into the realm of science and learning.

Plus, it is nice to know some doctors, at least, really do care.

Finally, tricking your brain in neat ways.

Cool video. I did not learn anything amazingly new, but it is still great to run through the usual optical illusions in the new (ish) context of the rapid-processing part of our brain that does all the routine stuff, and the slower, smarter, and more deliberate part of the brain that handles all the higher level conscious decisions and which likes to think it is in charge.

I see this as directly analogous to a typical human hierarchy, with the leader who, at least in theory, makes all the important decisions, and their staff, who make routine decisions on their own but who defer decisions upwards if they become too complex or involved.

The leader likes to think they are in charge, and in the long time broad view, they are. They decide where the organization goes and what it does. They are driving the bus.

But from another point of view, their decisions are few and far between, and the sheer number of decisions made by “underlings” without bothering the leader can make it seem like they are the ones really in control. They are not technically driving the bus, but they control it nevertheless.

And so it is with our two brains.

Seeya next week, folks!