When will we be able to upload our brains to a computer?

We often imagine that human consciousness is as simple as the input and output of electrical signals within a network of processing units – therefore comparable to a computer. The reality, however, is much more complicated. For starters, we don’t actually know how much information the human brain can hold.

Two years ago, a team at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, US, mapped the 3D structure of all the neurons (brain cells) comprised in one cubic millimeter of the brain of a mouse – a milestone considered extraordinary.

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Tom Waits: Downtown Train

Music video of Tom Waits’ “Downtown Train”. It is a song by Tom Waits released on his album Rain Dogs in 1985. The promo video for the song was directed by the French fashion photographer and music video director Jean-Baptiste Mondino and features the boxer Jake LaMotta (July 10, 1922 – September 19, 2017) as the old guy speaking to his wife at the beginning of the video.

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How much data we’re producing and where it’s all stored

Ancient humans stored information in cave paintings, the oldest we know of are over 40,000 years old. As humans evolved, the emergence of languages and the invention of writing led to detailed information being stored in various written forms, culminating with the invention of paper in China around the first century AD.

Melvin M. Vopson, University of Portsmouth

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This quantum internet breakthrough could help make hacking a thing of the past

This article is originally published on The Conversation under the title of “Our quantum internet breakthrough could help make hacking a thing of the past”.

Siddarth Koduru Joshi, University of Bristol

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Coding is not “fun”, it’s technically and ethically complex

By Walter Vannini

Programming computers is a piece of cake. Or so the world’s digital-skills gurus would have us believe. From the non-profit Code.org’s promise that ‘Anybody can learn!’ to Apple chief executive Tim Cook’s comment that writing code is ‘fun and interactive’, the art and science of making software is now as accessible as the alphabet.

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Would your mobile phone be powerful enough to get you to the moon?

Graham Kendall, University of Nottingham

Many people who are old enough to have experienced the first moon landing will vividly remember what it was like watching Neil Armstrong uttered his famous quote: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.“. Half a century later, the event is still one of the top achievements of humankind. Despite the rapid technological advances since then, astronauts haven’t actually been back to the moon since 1972.

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