Science Saturday: A Layman's Weekly Guide to the going-on's in theWorldof Science

Science can be complicated, irrelevant and most importantly... BORING. The goal of this weekly column is to bring the world of science down to Earth so that it can be understood, and hopefully appreciated by every one of us. Each week I'll choose a "scientific highlight" of the week and break it down piece by piece until it all makes sense! So let's do this...

First of all, this week we celebrated the anniversary of the first manned spaceflight to the moon in 1969, perhaps the greatest human accomplishment OF ALL TIME, without even mentioning that we flew to the moon only 100 years after we invented flight itself. It's a damn shame that this generation of astronauts is beginning to pass away (RIP Neil Armstrong)... I wonder what Dr. Octavius has to say about all this...
Check out this preview for the new Fox series Cosmos starting in 2014 featuring Neil Degrasse Tyson:

Anyway, on to this week's scientific breakthrough: (cue Inception theme song...)
This week, MIT scientists successfully implanted a false memory into the brain of a mouse.
I already know what you're thinking....

Why did they do it?

The purpose of this experiment is to hopefully help understand a well documented phenomenon where people remember life events that didn't actually happen, commonly referred to as "false memories". These kind of events tend to occur in sexual abuse and kidnapping scenarios. 

How did they do it?

First of all, you have to understand that all of the memories, associations and general brain functions are just a a series of chemical reactions and markers. Each one of these chemical markers are unique, thus each one of our memories are unique. The scientists at MIT, using a method referred to as INCEPTING (fuck yes!), were able to manipulate the chemistry in the brain of our mouse to think it had experienced something that never actually happened. In this particular study they manipulated the mouse into thinking it had experienced a painful shock, which it had not. 

How will this affect my life?

Well, frankly, it probably won't. Neurology is one of the least understood of all the sciences, granted science is continuously branching into newer branches, but for how old it is, we know remarkably little about how the brain works. The research is expensive and slow, and there are some obvious moral issues when it comes to testing on humans. BUT.... i've always maintained that the military is 10 years ahead of the public in terms of technology. This is well documented in everything from the internet and GPS to cell phones and AI. The fun mental exercise is Inception, but the terrifying scenario is something along the lines of the Manchurian Candidate.