Once again, we had an episode that looked like a mystery-of-the-week from the outset, but ended up connecting to the show's overarching mythology. The episode itself was fairly straightforward: teenage boy with mind control powers fakes his own kidnapping, tries to extort Massive Dynamic (where his father works) for the ransom, then kidnaps Peter for a fun killing spree (with time out at a strip club). But, as always, there's a little more going on beneath the surface:

Mommy Issues: The relationships between fathers and sons has been a big theme on Fringe of late, but this time we also got into the issue of absent mothers. Tyler, the 15-year-old who can control people's minds, is on a quest to find the mother he never knew, and Walter finds himself reminiscing about Peter's mother. There's been a lot of foreshadowing in these episodes, and given that William Bell recited Peter's mother's maxim to Olivia, we could be preparing for a meeting between Peter and his over there mother. Plus, how great is it that Walter tries to counteract Tyler's mind control by playing the sounds babies hear in the womb?

Leading Walter by the Nose: It's a little distressing how well Massive Dynamic knows how to manipulate Walter, though I suppose they know more than enough about him and his research from William Bell. They know exactly what kind of research to fabricate, what questions he'll ask. They even know to tell him that Tyler is taking ADD medication. Walter says he doesn't trust them, but the team took this one a bit too much at face value.

Penrose-Carson Experiments: So, at the end of the episode, we learn that Tyler's mother is not actually his mother, but a surrogate, and that Tyler is the result of one of Massive Dynamic's experiments, namely the Penrose-Carson Experiments. Carson is Tyler's father, but we've also met Penrose before. Clause Penrose is the creator/father of Christopher Penrose, the pituitary-eating fellow from last season. We know that there are multiple Christophers, and it sounds like there may be multiple Tylers as well. So perhaps we will be seeing Dr. Penrose soon and get more of these shady experiments Massive Dynamic is performing.

Astrid Action: Astrid managed to tiptoe into the field this week. She's the one who noticed the odd searches on Tyler's computer and she drives the car while

Walter Moment of the Week: Walter and Astrid discussing what human brains might taste like was a close second, but this week's winner goes to Walter's tinfoil hat — to keep Massive Dynamic from reading his mind. It's a legitimate fear, but I'm not sure the hat is going to keep Nina Sharp at bay. But hey, he even got Astrid to wear one, and it looks kind of chic on her.

A team led by Gero Miesenbock of the University of Oxford has been working to identify and manipulate brain cells linked to associative learning, where an animal learns to associate a certain cue with a specific outcome. There are just 12 cells in the fly brain linked with associative learning.

To determine which cells are associated with bad memories, the researchers sought to trigger those cells and, at the same time release an odor. If the fly avoided the odor in the future, they new that they had successfully rewritten the fly's memory to associate that odor with a bad experience.

They modified neurons in the flies' brains by adding a receptor that is activated by ATP. They then injected the brains with ATP placed inside a light-activated cage. They then targeted a laser at the appropriate cells, causing the release of the ATP and activating the receptors. At the same time they flashed the laser, the researchers released the odor.

Sure enough, when presented with two odors placed at equal distances from the flies, the flies who had received the laser flash avoided the odor they had been programmed to associate with bad memories. The flies effective "remembered" that something bad was associated with the smell, even though they had never experienced it themselves.

And Miesenbock believes that this could have implications for human brains as well. Researchers may be just understanding how animals learn from and adapt to mistakes, but he has every expectation that the mechanism for humans will be, on a fundamental level, the same as the mechanism for flies.

Bad memories written with lasers [BBC]

Wait It Out

Animorphs: The Yeerks travel throughout the universe, enslaving various species, and are currently working on their conquest of Earth. The slug-like creatures take control of their hosts by crawling in through the ear canal, but can only stay inside for three days at a time, after which they need to leave to absorb the rays from their home sun. They can put off the ray bath by having their host consume instant maple and ginger oatmeal, but too much of the stuff will drive the Yeerks insane.

“The Shadow Out of Time” by HP Lovecraft: The Yithians are not physical parasites, but can take control of another being’s body by swapping minds with their victims. They then control their victims’ bodies, learning all they can. Once they’ve gotten the information they want, Yithians generally let their victims have their bodies back. But, on at least one occasion, the Yithians have held onto another race’s bodies indefinitely.

Conquer it with Willpower

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Ceti eels are not themselves sentient, but nasty little critters will burrow inside its host’s brain, making it extremely susceptible to suggestion. After Khan plants a Ceti eel in Commander Chekov’s ear, Chekov resists Khan’s influence and collapses, causing the eel to slip back out of his ear. It’s not a foolproof method, though; fellow eel infectee Clark Terrell also resists Khan’s order to assassinate Kirk, but ends up shooting himself instead.

Dehydrate It

The Faculty: The faculty of Herrington High School are controlled by yet another breed of ear canal-seeking parasite, giving them the single-minded purpose of spreading the parasites to the entire student body. Fortunately, one of the students keeps around a stash of his homemade recreational drug, which happens to be a diuretic. One shot of that stuff dries up the parasites and probably leaves the victims high enough to write off the whole ordeal as a fever dream.

Angel “The Price”: A swarm of thirsty silicone slugs are the price some pay for using dark magic. The best way to de-worm an infected host is to dehydrate them, which can be achieved by consuming copious amounts of booze. But the slugs assume a limit control over the host’s body, prompting them to drink water until the slugs drain them completely dry.

Build Up Your Post-Infection Immunity

The X-Files: Purity, the fearsome Black Oil that appears throughout the series, is absorbed by humans on contact. The human host becomes a slave to the alien Black Oil, spreading the virus to others and helping the extraterrestrial colonists reproduce. There is a vaccine, albeit a weak one, which has, in some cases, reversed the infection.

Doctor Who “The Invisible Enemy”: After encountering the Swarm, an intelligent virus that controls the infected, the Doctor is repeatedly infected, although thanks to his Time Lord constitution, he is able to overcome his infections. But his companion Leela is entirely immune to the Swarm. When the Doctor finally succumbs to infection, a miniaturized Leela clone enters the Doctor’s body, giving the Doctor her immunity as they force the virus out of his body.

Remove It By Force

Stargate SG-1: The snaky Goa’uld burrow into their host’s brain, accessing its memories and taking control of its body. Removing a Goa’uld symbiote is tricky since it will poison its host if it senses its life is in danger. But a handful of species have developed methods of separating the symbiotes from their hosts.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer: The alien Souls are surgically inserted inside the bodies of other species, possessing individuals so that they can quietly conquer the planet and turn it into a peaceful, carefully controlled paradise. And a person with the correct knowledge can remove the alien in the same manner.

Lexx “Eating Pattern” and “Bad Carrot”: Lexx features a pair of mind-controlling parasites. The snake-like creature in “Eating Pattern” turns Stan into a cannibal and has to be forcibly extracted from his neck. The carrot-shaped drone in “Bad Carrot” enters through the rectum and must be expelled the same way.

Marvel Symbiotes: The alien symbiotes of the Marvel Universe offer their hosts incredible powers, but they merge not only with the host’s physical being, but with their personality as well. But the symbiotes generally have a weakness to heat, sound, or electricity, which can force them to separate from the host.

Infect the Infection

The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein: The inspiration for many later mind control parasites, the alien slugs of The Puppet Masters attach themselves to the backs of their hosts, bring the hosts under the aliens’ control. The slugs can be physically detached, but that is not sufficient to control the epidemic. Instead, the resisting humans infect the population with a disease that is fatal to the slugs, treating the humans once their slug masters die.

Defeat It with Alien Superpowers

Ben 10: Alien Force “Max Out”: Ben’s cousin has the misfortune of being attached to a Xenocyte, an alien leech that not only exerts mind control, but also transforms its human host into a DNAlien. But the Omnitrix, the alien device that gives Ben his powers, has a genetic repair function that reverses the melding.

New X-Men “Here Comes Tomorrow”: The sentient bacteria Sublime can also take possession of human bodies and, as John Sublime, has quietly worked behind the scenes in mutant research and living weapons development. In an alternate future, Jean Grey, using the alien Phoenix Force, destroys Sublime once and for all.

Kill the Parasite’s Master

Babylon 5: Keepers, the genetically engineered parasites used by the Drakh to control their victims, cannot be surgically removed and are only sedated by alcohol. But killing the Drakh that spawned the keeper will destroy the parasite without harming the host.

In The Faculty the infection also ends with the destruction of the alien queen, and in the Doctor Who episode “The Invisible Enemy,” killing the disease’s nucleus puts an end to the disease.

Once It’s Off, Switch to a Garlic Shampoo

Futurama: An important step in any brain parasite removal is preventing another infection. Switching to a garlic shampoo deters reattachment, as does wearing a helmet. Just be sure that your friends don’t mistake your fallen brain slug for an unusual hat, or you could be reinfected before you get a chance to wash your hair.

Ultrasound has a lot of great uses, like creating an image of an unborn baby or testing the internal structure of a piece of metal without destroying the piece. What we mean by "ultrasound" is a pressure wave with a frequency above about 20 kHz, the upper limit of hearing for most humans. By measuring the different rates of reflection off of different surfaces, we can use it as a sort of "sonic x-ray" on some materials, including pregnant women's tummies. Scientists have known for decades that ultrasound causes changes in muscle and nerve tissues, but the ASU team studied exactly what happens at the cellular level. They found that LILF ultrasound starts a series of reactions that eventually trigger synapses within the brain.

The short-term relevance of the research could revolutionize certain medical procedures that require neuron stimulation. A host of therapies for various mental conditions currently require implantation of electrodes into the brain, and thus are seldom performed due to the risk. Ultrasound might be able to do the job non-invasively and open the door to these treatments for tens of thousands of patients.

For now, the researchers are focused on giving Arnold Schwarzenegger a fake vacation to Mars. Lead investigator William Tyler weighed on the potential for ultrasonic brain control:

"One might be able to envision potential applications ranging from medical interventions to use in video gaming or the creation of artificial memories along the lines of Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in 'Total Recall.' Imagine taking a vacation without actually going anywhere? Obviously, we need to conduct further research and development, but one of the most exhilarating prospects is that low intensity, low frequency ultrasound permit deep-brain stimulation procedures without requiring exogenous proteins or surgically implanted medical devices."

Image by: Reigh LeBlanc.

Ultrasound shown to exert remote control of brain circuits. [EurekAlert!]

Scientists at the University of Cambridge cut down on the drug-seeking behavior of cocaine-addicted rats by giving them a chemical that blocked NMDA-type receptors in the brain. First, they gave the rats a bunch of coke while flashing a light. Later, when they flashed the same light, they inspired the rats to look really frantically for drugs and engage in behaviors that had gotten them coke before. And yet when the scientists administered a chemical that blocked the rats' NMDA receptors, the rats who saw the flashing light didn't start trying to get drugs.

NMDA receptors are associated with learning and memory. Researchers speculate that interfering with them affects with memory retrieval, blocking or changing the memories significantly. According to the Society for Neuroscience:

Several NMDA receptor inhibitors are already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, including the cough suppressant dextramethorphan and the Alzheimer's disease drug memantine.

"This is an example of hypothesis-driven basic research that can be readily translated to the treatment of cocaine addiction in humans," said Yavin Shaham, PhD, at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an expert uninvolved in the study.

So drug addicts may be given the real-life equivalent of the memory-erasing technique we saw in The Manchurian Candidate. What I want to know is what exactly it feels like to have your memories tampered with so much that you no longer recall wanting to do a drug you've been addicted to. Do you literally forget taking the drug? Or do you just forget that it felt good?

Halting retrieval of drug-associated memories may prevent addiction relapse [Journal of Neuroscience via Eurekalert]

So here are a couple more screens from the incredible Agent Cody Banks 2 mind-control device. First of all, what if you want to figure out which world leaders you have yet to take over? That sounds like a challenging database request, but it's actually simplicity itself:

See what I mean? It's a simple pull-down menu! And then what if you've already mind-controlled the CIA director and want to use him to pull the president into an brain-implanting ambush? Surely you'd have to go through ten screens trying to figure out which of your implants is in the CIA director, and then give him a complex instruction set? No! It takes like two keystrokes, and is simplicity itself!

Word to software developers out there: this is the kind of streamlined, easy user experience you should be striving for in your own products, world-domination-related or otherwise.

Writes Shachtman:

In a recent report, unearthed by Secrecy News, the [Pentagon science advisory team] JASONs are recommending that the American military push ahead with its own performance-enhancement research — and monitor foreign studies — to make sure that the U.S.' enemies don't suddenly become smarter, faster, or better able to endure the harsh realities of war than American troops.

He quotes members of JASON worrying about the possible ways enemies might make use of a brain-computer interface. Most concerning are the problems that:

may arise in a feedback mode, in which a the interface provides a soldier with a simple signal or a pain/pleasure pulse in response to externally provided situational information. Longer term adversarial developments may include prosthetic applications providing specialized sensory input or mechanical output.

Wait, what? A "pleasure pulse in response to externally provided situational information"? OK, I know I read about that on mcstories first. Is it wrong of me to want to volunteer to test one of these out? I only want the pleasure model, though.

Top Pentagon Scientists Fear Brain-Modified Foes [Danger Room]

As Pittsburgh researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Nature, humans have shown in the past that they can move cursors on a screen using a similar brain-machine interface. But by grabbing food and bringing it to their mouths, the monkeys are paving the way towards advanced neuro-prosthetics for people with permanent paralysis. Further down the road, you even could imagine able-bodied people using the technology to manipulate robo-arms or even full exoskeletons with their thoughts.

Source: Nature via PhysOrg

Images: University of Pittsburgh, The New York Times

The film is a Matrix-meets-cyborgs story featuring incredible animation, tons of bullets, lots of John Woo signature slow-motion, and even some cyborg doves. It's arguably, in this blogger's opinion, superior to the original Appleseed, and is at its best when things devolve into pure bullets and octane action. Thankfully, the multi-layered story is cerebral fodder as well as eye candy, so you won't get bored while you watch another clip of armor-piercing bullets get emptied into mindless robo-slaves.

Hypnosis. It's been proven (in court, no less) that hypnosis can create false memories. So you could pay a hypnotist to give you falsely happy memories of your childhood, erasing your sadistic home-ec teacher and replacing her with a friendly polar bear. You can also use hypnosis to regress yourself back to childhood (temporarily, we hope) so you can have a funner time the second time around. Just don't overshoot and regress to a past life. The best thing would be a version of the Tantalus machine from that Star Trek episode, which implants fake memories directly into your brain.

Falsify the evidence. Last fall, researchers reported that if you show people a picture of something that never happened, they start to believe it actually did. The researchers showed people doctored photos of a protest in Italy and the Tiananmen Square protests in China, and afterwards people remembered the events happening that way. In an older study, scientists showed people a picture of a child at Disney World shaking hands with Bugs Bunny. The subjects started to believe they'd met Bugs Bunny at Disney World when they were kids. Which is impossible, because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. character, not a Disney character.

So in a few years when Photoshop gets way better, you may be able to pay someone to construct new family pictures for you, altering some details digitally to make your childhood seem happier. Maybe they can even be holographic and interactive, and you can display them around your home.

Take a pill. Researchers from the excitingly named Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics say that memory-erasing pills are probably not that far off. (They put out this press release to tie in with the movie Paycheck, which many people wanted to erase their memories of watching.) The tricky part would be selectively erasing the bad memories and keeping the good memories. Or maybe, like Johnny Mnemonic, you'd rather just erase your whole childhood. Then at least ignorance would be bliss.

Clone yourself. Despite what many science fiction shows and movies have told us, your clone will be a baby. So you'll be able to give your clone the perfect awesome childhood you never had. It won't be the same as fixing your own childhood, but you can have a happy one vicariously.

Change your birth order. Some psychologists claim that your birth order, whether you're the first, second or third born, alters how you remember your childhood and influences your personality traits. (First-borns are leaders, middle-borns are flexible, youngest-borns are creative.) Probably a lot of this has to do with how you experience childhood at the time. But some of it may also be retroactive, to do with how you reconstruct your childhood memories. So all you have to do is put your older siblings, or yourself, into cryogenic suspension or stasis, so that you swap ages. That will have the effect of making you the older (or younger) sibling, and may help to change how you view your childhood.

Travel in time. This is probably the hardest one to pull off at the moment. Plus, even if you could time-travel, you might have some fussy restrictions on meeting your past self. So you'd be stuck trying to find ways to fix your childhood without interacting with your young self. So you're stuck with killing everybody who was ever mean to you when you were young. But if you could get past that hurdle, you could become your own cool aunt/uncle.

Dr. Begich isolates a spooky trend in military thought that sees the human being reduced to the status of a "data-processing system" that can be affected or incapacitated depending on the energy inputs it receives. As one article, "The Mind Has No Firewall," from Parameters, the U.S. Army War College Journal, put it, "The body is capable not only of being deceived, manipulated, or misinformed but also shut down or destroyed — just as any other data-processing system." Electromagnetic or acoustic energy waves can alter the individual's "hardware system" and manipulate the "data" stored in their psyche. According to Dr. Begich, technologies already exist that can "shift a person's emotions using remote electromagnetic tools," and "transfer sound in a way where only the targeted person" hears a voice in their head.

Famous names: Milo Manara

Crunchy goodness: 2

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: Manara put out three sequels, plus a naughty invisible man story and a naughty Gulliver's Island ripoff. And Click inspired a whole flotilla of depraved fetishists on the Internet.

Sights you'll never unsee: Three words: Dog in heat. Also, drugged emenas that cause women to have clairvoyant visions. Okay then.

The shit: The field of erotic science-fiction comics is not exactly overcrowded, but Manara manages to make it seem like a viable chimera. The ornateness of his art, combined with the sense of all heck breaking loose when the woman's dial is turned up, combine to make you forget quite how ooky the whole thing is.

Deadliest spoiler: Claudia gets back together with her attorney husband in Click 4. But then an incestuous brother-sister duo get their hands on a remote control and decide to use her remote-controlled sex drive to battle corporate corruption. Or something.

Milo Manara: The Official Website (maybe NSFW)