Police in the Spanish city of San Sebastián de la Gomera have cordoned off an abandoned house after finding a 22-foot-long wasp nest.

As ThinkSpain reports, officers were called to the scene by concerned neighbours. The massive nest is located in a hallway and may contain millions of wasps. Experts say that the common wasp found in Spain could never build a nest of this size, leading them to think that it's an invasive species from Africa.

The police have not been able to trace the owner of the house.

For those of you wondering what it might be like to walk around like Doctor Octopus, this British-built hexapod could be exactly what you're looking for.

Called the Mantis Walking Machine, it was designed by Matt Denton and his team at Micromagic Systems. It took over four years to develop, but it's the largest all-terrain operational hexapod robot in the world.

Mantis runs off a 2.2-litre, 50 horsepower turbo diesel engine, and it stands 2.8 meters (9 feet) tall. It can be piloted directly or controlled via wifi. Functionally, it can manipulate objects (like pushing a trailer) or fold itself into a truck bed.

As of now, Mantis walks around at the achingly slow pace of 1 km/hr. Its navigational software has to rely solely on the information given to it by its legs as they touch the ground. Future versions will likely utilize visual systems, allowing Mantis to evaluate the topography of its environment in advance.

And then you'll be sorry. YOU'LL ALL BE SORRY!!

Anyway, Mantis is available for private hire, custom commissions, events, and sponsorships. Just imagine this thing romping around at some kid's 10th birthday party.

H/t Singularity Hub.

For the first time in medical history, biologists have transplanted a functional lab-grown kidney into a live animal.

Ever since scientists started dabbling with stem cells — those super-adaptable “pluripotent” cells that can transform into virtually any other kind of cell — there’s been hope that we’ll eventually figure out how to grow fully functional replacement organs in the lab. And indeed, regenerative medicine has shown much promise over the years, including successful experiments in which tiny mouse hearts and other organs have been grown.

But building an approximation of an organ with stem cells is one thing — actually getting it to work properly in anticipation of transplantation is quite another. Now, researchers working at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston may have overcome this major hurdle.

A team led by Harald Ott took a pre-existing rat’s kidney and stripped it of all its cells by washing it with a special detergent-like mixture. Once the native cells were stripped away, the biologists were left with a kidney scaffold that they used to create a bioengineered graft of the real thing.

To create this graft, they introduced stem cells and fostered their re-growth. Specifically, the team re-seeded the kidney scaffolds with epithelial and endothelial cells, and used a pressure gradient to ensure that the right cells were growing in the right places (a process that was key to the experiment).

Eventually, after five days in an incubating chamber, the tissue became functional, resulting in grafts that could produce rudimentary urine — urine that did not function as well as natural ones, but was an acceptably close approximation for the purposes of the experiment (the scientists admitted that this is something they’re going to have to work on, a limitation that was likely the result of the immaturity of the kidney cells used).

But once they were satisfied that the lab-grown kidneys were working, then then transplanted them into live rats where they continued to function and produce the rudimentary urine.

The experiment resulted in the first functional lab-grown transplanted organ — a breakthrough that could eventually result in similar transplants in humans. And in fact, during the experiment, the researchers also worked with human and pig kidneys (though not for transplantation).

Read the entire study at Nature Medicine: “Regeneration and experimental orthotopic transplantation of a bioengineered kidney”.

Images: Shutterstock/Jeff Cameron Collingwood; Ott Lab, Center for Regenerative Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital.

Damn. Now removed. Thanks for the head's up.

The International Astronomical Union has officially responded to Uwingu's planet-naming campaign, saying it's misleading and that it has absolutely no bearing on the official naming process.

Space-enthusiasts are understandably annoyed by the the painfully boring and seemingly non-sensical alpha-numeric designations given to exoplanets. This prompted Uwingu, a science-funding organization, to start a naming campaign for Alpha Centauri B b, the nearest known exoplanet. For $4.99 entrants can propose a name for the planet, and for $0.99 they can vote for a name already suggested.

Trouble is, the campaign is bullshit. Late last week the IAU issued a statement making it very clear that no one can buy the right to name a planet. And at the same time, the group took the opportunity to explain why planets are named the way they are:

Recently, an organisation has invited the public to purchase both nomination proposals for exoplanets, and rights to vote for the suggested names. In return, the purchaser receives a certificate commemorating the validity and credibility of the nomination. Such certificates are misleading, as these campaigns have no bearing on the official naming process — they will not lead to an officially-recognised exoplanet name, despite the price paid or the number of votes accrued...

...While exoplanet names such as 16 Cygni Bb or HD 41004 Ab may seem boring when considering the names of planets in our own Solar System, the vast number of objects in our Universe — galaxies, stars, and planets to name just a few — means that a clear and systematic system for naming these objects is vital. Any naming system is a scientific issue that must also work across different languages and cultures in order to support collaborative worldwide research and avoid confusion.

To make this possible, the IAU acts as a single arbiter of the naming process, and is advised and supported by astronomers within different fields. As an international scientific organisation, it dissociates itself entirely from the commercial practice of selling names of planets, stars or or even "real estate" on other planets or moons. These practices will not be recognised by the IAU and their alternative naming schemes cannot be adopted.

The IAU also acknowledged the increase in public interest and concern. Starting this year, the IAU Commission on 53 Extrasolar Planets and other IAU members will be consulted on the topic of having popular names for exoplanets.

UPDATE: Alan Stern, CEO of Uwingu, has responded. From Space.com: "Stern said he takes issue with such statements. Uwingu has never maintained that the winning name will be anything other than a popular or common moniker, he says." More.

Image: IAU.

Just added Stern's comment to Space.com.

What if you could control somebody's desires using a wireless device? It's not a Larry Niven novel — it's today's science. Researchers used a remote controller to stimulate neurons in mice that release the reward chemical dopamine. As a result, they changed the behavior of the mice, from a distance, in the absence of any tangible reward.

And they did it using optogenetics, an emerging field of research in which living, cortical neurons and other cells can be manipulated or controlled with optical technology (typically with fiber optic cables). It’s only been tested in nonhuman animals like rodents and monkeys, but it could eventually be used to treat such things as heart conditions, paralysis, and even diabetes.

But now, as new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has shown, optogenetics could also be used to stimulate the brain's reward and pleasure pathways — all without unwieldy wires or cables stuck into the brain.

In the new study, which has now been published in Science, a research team co-led by Washington University’s Michael R. Bruchas demonstrates how optogenetic effects can be triggered over wireless.

To make it happen, the researchers developed multicolored microscale, inorganic light-emitting diodes (µILEDs) that are just 6.45 microns thick (that's thinner than a human hair and about the size of an individual neuron). The µILEDs were implanted into the brains of mice who were genetically engineered to have parts of their brain responsive to light. It was the first time these devices were used in an optogenetics experiment for the purpose of testing on freely moving animals.

Once the implants were inserted deep inside a mouse’s brain (nailing the exact location, or pathway, was critical), it was placed in a specially designed maze outfitted with a series of holes. But each time it poked its nose through one hole in particular, the cellular-sized µILEDs stimulated dopamine-producing cells in its brain (all the other holes did nothing). As a result, the mouse was rewarded for its behavior in the same way that we would be “rewarded” after biting into, say, a piece of chocolate.

Dopamine makes us feel good, which can in turn reinforce (or condition) a particular behavior. In this case, the mice experienced pleasure each time they poked their noses through one specific hole — and all without receiving any real kind of reward (like food or visual stimulation).

As a result, the researchers "taught" the mice to poke their heads through the one hole, while disregarding the others.

Interestingly, the scientists also observed that the mice developed an associated preference for the area near the hole and they preferred to hang around that part of the maze.

Though this experiment might seem a bit bizarre, the researchers are hoping to see these technologies applied to humans for pain management and the treatment of brain disorders like depression, anxiety, addiction, and sleep disorders. These implants could also be used to trigger specific responses in other organ systems.

“We believe these devices will allow us to study complex stress and social interaction behaviors,” Bruchas explained through a statement. “This technology enables us to map neural circuits with respect to things like stress and pain much more effectively.”

Read the entire paper at Science: “Injectable, Cellular-Scale Optoelectronics with Applications for Wireless Optogenetics.”

Supplementary source: Washington University in St. Louis.

Top image: MIT McGovern Institute & MIT Synthetic Neurobiology Group; interior images: Washington University.

Magnetic putty is on the prowl again, but this time its terrifying powers can be seen in this stunning new hi-def video put together by FX artist Joey Shanks.

As we've shown you before, magnetic putty — that is, putty embedded with millions of micron-sized ferromagnetic particles — bursts to life when placed near an object that generates a strong magnetic field. And it absolutely will not stop until the object of its desire has been completely engulfed on all sides.

You can purchase magnetic putty here.

It's important to remember that these shots were sped-up to account for the magnetic putty's agonizingly slow rate of advance, but the effect is stunning nonetheless. According to Shanks, the clips were exported at 48 fps, and some at 96 fps.

These latest clips were pulled from the recent film short SCI-FLY, a product of PBS Digital Studios and Shanks FX.

H/t Colossal.

That would be wild.

It looks like something someone created with a spirograph, but it's called a connectogram, and it's increasingly being used by neuroscientists to map and interpret the complex connections of white matter fiber buried deep inside the human brain.

These circular representations — a kind of intersection between data, neuroscience and art — can encompass a variety of uses, including as a way to visualize white matter atrophy in traumatic brain injury, or to study structural connectivity in infants. It's also being used in connectomics as part of the brain mapping initiative.

The graphs are compiled through the use of diffusion weighted (DWI) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Using these tools, neuroscientists can assess white matter fiber pathways between brain regions to measure fiber bundle properties, as well as their influence on behavior and cognition.

The connectogram shown above represents the inter-brain-region connections of 110 right-handed men. The left side of the circle represents the left hemisphere, and the right side the right hemisphere.

Broken down even further, the circle is divided neatly into the frontal lobe, insular cortex, limbic lobe, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, subcortical structures, and cerebellum.

Within each lobe, each cortical area is assigned an abbreviation and a unique color. The color codes themselves represent the strength of the connections (including fractional anistropy, or white matter integrity). Image credit: John Darrell Van Horn.

This connectogram belongs to Phineas Gage, who in 1848 survived a large iron bar being shot through his skull and brain. This diagram only shows the connections that are thought to be damaged by the incident. Image credit: John Darrell Van Horn.

H/t It's Okay to Be Smart.

It may look like something designed by Iron Man’s Stark Industries, but this new touchscreen is for real. Developed by Fujitsu Laboratories, it’s an interface that essentially turns paper into a touchscreen, allowing for seamless data transfer between the real and virtual worlds.

Traditionally, hand gestures have been used to operate computer tablets and other devices. But Fujitsu’s new interface lets users touch analog mediums directly and manipulate them in tandem with image processing technology. And incredibly, it doesn’t require any special hardware — just an ordinary webcam and a commercial projector.

The system can measure the shape of real-world objects and automatically adjust the coordinates for the camera, projector, and real world. It can also accommodate irregular surfaces like the curved surfaces of books.

From Fujitsu:

The system is designed not to react when you make ordinary motions on a table. It can be operated when you point with one finger. What this means is, the system serves as an interface combining analog operations and digital devices.

The system can also adjust for color and brightness in consideration of the ambient light, and correct for individual differences in hand color.

We aim to develop a commercial version of this system by fiscal 2014. It's still at the demonstration level, so it's not been used in actual settings. Next, we'd like to get people to use it for actual tasks, see what issues arise, and evaluate usability. We want to reflect such feedback in this system.

Source: Diginfo, Fujitsu.

By bombarding insects with electrons, Japanese researchers formed a microscopically thin layer that protected them from the ravages of a vacuum. The discovery suggests a way that microbes might survive the harsh conditions of outer space — and perhaps humans as well.

Insects don’t fare well in a vacuum. When exposed to severely reduced pressure, they shrivel-up and die within minutes. But as Takahiko Hariyama and colleagues recently discovered, if the bugs are bathed in a beam of electrons, they become surprisingly tolerant to a high vacuum.

They came to this realization after placing a live fruit fly larva under an electron microscope — microscopes that only work on objects placed within a vacuum, otherwise air molecules absorb the electrons required to take the image. But after expecting the larva to quickly dehydrate, it continued to survive and thrive. And in fact, it eventually grew into a healthy fruit fly.

Writing in ScienceNOW, Sean Treacy explains what happened:

The scientists then used the microscope to peer closely at the edge of the insects' skin. They found that the energy from the electrons changed the thin film on the larvae's skin, causing its molecules to link together—a process called polymerization. The result was a layer—only 50- to 100-billionths of a meter thick—that was flexible enough to allow the larva to move, but solid enough to keep its gasses and liquids from escaping. "Even if we touched the surface [of the layer]," Hariyama says, "the surface did not break by our mechanical touch." It was almost like a miniature spacesuit.

The team dubbed the layers "nano-suits." Most insects do not have natural layers on their surfaces that become nano-suits when exposed to an electron stream, however. So Hariyama and colleagues decided to create artificial nano-suits. They dunked mosquito larvae in a pool of water mixed with a chemical called Tween 20, which is useful because it's not toxic and is commonly found in detergents, cosmetics, and hard candy. The researchers then showered each larva in plasma, so that the Tween 20 would polymerize and become a nano-suit, and moved the nano-suited larvae to the microscope's vacuum to watch what happened.

Treacy also spoke to an astrobiologist about the discovery:

The finding is "exciting," says astrobiologist Lynn Rothschild of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who was not involved in the work, because it indicates that nano-suited creatures might survive travel by a meteorite or comet through the extreme environments of space. She notes that it could also have applications for space travel. "Imagine a flexible space shield, roughly the diameter of a human hair that could protect against dehydration and radiation."

Read the entire article at ScienceNOW; and check out the study at PNAS: “A thin polymer membrane, nano-suit, enhancing survival across the continuum between air and high vacuum.”

Image: Yasuharu Takaku et al./PNAS

Since it was first discovered in late March of this year, the H7N9 virus has infected 60 people, killing 13. It’s not clear whether the virus can spread from person to person. But as the first round of tests on the virus has shown, it has some troublesome characteristics.

Scientists from around the world have been busy studying the virus now that its genome has been sequenced.

Research by He Jianku of South University of Science and Technology of China suggests it can change rapidly; a protein that binds H7N9 to its host’s cells may be mutating at a rate eight times faster than in a typical flu virus. He found dramatic mutations of haemagglutinin in one of the four flu strains released for study by the Chinese government; nine of the protein's 560 amino acids had changed. Typically, only one or two amino acids change in such a short period of time.

Nature News is reporting that the new virus has several mutations which make it more adapted to humans than H5N1. According to Jeremy Farrar, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, “This looks very different from H5N1. We never saw this number of presumed avian/animal to human transmissions in such a short space of time."

Adding insult to injury, H7N9 doesn’t appear to cause serious illness in poultry and other birds, making it difficult to detect, track, and control. Chinese officials have developed a test to detect the virus in humans, but no such test currently exists in North America.

A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine described H7N9 as a “novel reassortant influenza A” virus with genetic similarities to strains found in three different birds — a Beijing finch, and ducks from Zhejiang Province and Korea. The paper’s authors don’t know how the new strain developed, but there’s no evidence the genetic reassortment occurred in a mammalian host. And indeed, given how similar the human virus is to the three avian strains, it was probably transmitted directly by birds.

The NEJM paper also noted that the virus spreads more easily to people than similar viruses, claiming that “The gene sequences also indicate that these viruses may be better adapted than other avian influenza viruses to infecting mammals.”

And once in humans, it's anything but pleasant. Writing in Forbes, Melanie Haiken describes its effects:

In an analysis of the virological data and circumstances surrounding the first three fatalities, a large team of Chinese researchers found that the patients became ill quickly, developed very severe pneumonia and upper respiratory distress, and their condition deteriorated very quickly with sepsis and failure of multiple organs. Particularly worrying is that two of the three developed encephalopathy, or infection of the membrane surrounding the brain.

Some of the background information in the report also offers reason for concern. Yes, all three of the victims had previously existing health conditions; one had COPD, and two had hepatitis B. One was obese. But while one patient was 87, the other two were only 27 and 35. And while two of the three had had contact with poultry in the weeks before falling ill (one was a butcher, the other had been in a poultry shop), one had no record of contact with birds.

Lastly, developing a vaccine for H7N9 could prove difficult. Clinical trials of vaccines designed to protect against other viruses in the H7 family have shown that vaccines don't induce much of an immune response, even when people are given what would be considered very large doses.

That said, Sinovac Biotech Ltd. is planning to develop immunizations against the virus, which they hope to have ready for commercial use by July. But that’s months away. Given the virus's frightening rate of spread, that could prove to be a serious problem.

Top image via China.org.cn. Inset images via ECDC.

Welcome to the apocalypse: It's 1916, and with the threat of chemical warfare lurking around the corner, these British troops stationed in France aren't taking any chances.

Indeed, these guys had every right to be worried. By the end of World War I, over 50,000 tons of chemical agents were used by both sides, including chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas. Official figures estimate about 85,000 total deaths and 1,176,500 non-fatal casualties directly caused by chemical warfare agents during the course of the war.

This press photo is entitled, "Soccer team of British soldiers with gas masks, World War I, somewhere in Northern France, 1916." Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (531).

H/t Retronaut.

Scientists working at the University of Warwick have identified an undocumented type of gamma-ray burst, the product of massive stars destroyed in a way previously unknown to astronomers.

Gamma-ray bursts are among the most powerful forces in nature. As a supergiant star goes supernova, it shoots out directed beams of concentrated gamma-rays across vast distances. A typical burst can release as much energy in a few seconds as the sun does its entire 10-billion-year lifespan.

These events are extremely rare, and the only ones observed to date have occurred outside our galaxy. And thank goodness for that; a gamma-ray burst pointed directly at Earth would very likely cause a mass extinction event by ionizing our atmosphere. And in fact, it’s quite possible that the Ordovician extinction, which happened about 450 million years ago, was caused by a gamma-ray burst.

The Long and the Short of It

Until this new discovery, gamma-ray bursts were placed into one of two categories.

Short duration bursts last for a few seconds and occur when two neutron stars collide, producing a black hole.

Long duration gamma-ray bursts last for about a minute and happen when a Wolf-Rayet star explodes as a supernova, producing a black hole at its core. These massive stars are about 20 times the mass of our own sun and with a radius 1,000 times larger (that's a mind-boggling 3.2 billion kilometres wide).

But on Christmas Day of 2010, scientists using NASA’s Swift satellite noticed a very strange celestial event, one that was subsequently analyzed by Andrew Levan and colleagues at the University of Warwick.

"A new population of ultra-long duration gamma-ray bursts"

Levan's re-interpretation of the data revealed a supergiant that had gone supernova in a galaxy about 7 billion years away (twice the distance of the previous estimate). And strangely, it exhibited an unusually long duration gamma-ray burst — one that poured out of the supernova for hours instead of seconds.

Since this initial observation, astronomers have discovered two more similar examples.

To explain this unprecedented phenomenon, Levan and his team proposed a new theory suggesting that these ultra-long bursts happen because it takes much longer for the supernova explosion to propagate through the massive star, which in turn causes the gamma-ray burst to last for a much longer time.

Typically, most stars that generate gamma-ray bursts are relatively small and dense, resulting in the minute-long events. In these explosions, matter is pulled into the black hole, but some of the energy escapes quickly and violently at nearly the speed of light.

But in these ultra-long duration events, the astronomers speculate that a newly formed black hole in the core of the dying star is powering the explosion. The gamma-ray bursts in these massive stars need to power and plough through the copious amounts of solar material, which results in these extra-long bursts.

Alternatively, Levan’s team considered the possibility that they arise from the tidal disruption of stars by supermassive black holes.

This research was presented at the GRB 2013 Symposium in Nashville, Tennessee on Tuesday, April 16th. Levan’s paper can be read here: “A new population of ultra-long duration gamma-ray bursts.”

Images: University of Warwick; NASA.

The burial grounds beneath old gallows and scaffolds tend to be ignored by scientists. But owing to the work of a new breed of archaeologist, we're learning more about the horrific ways medieval prisoners were tortured and killed — and how the executioners lived.

News of this latest trend comes to us by virtue of a recent Der Spiegel article describing the work of execution site archaeologists Marita Genesis and Jost Auler.

Indeed, there are plenty of worthwhile sites to investigate in Europe. Later this year, the archaeologists plan to dig-up the remains beneath an executioner’s scaffold in the southeastern Austrian state of Styria and investigate the gallows in the Bavarian town of Pottenstein.

By meticulously sifting through these ancient burial sites and studying the remains of executed prisoners, these scientists are uncovering a surprising amount of historical information, much of it not found in the surviving texts.

For example:

The evidence they find testifies to the brutality of the Middle Ages. The archaeologists often discover scattered remains. Many cities allowed miscreants to hang in the wind for years. Ravens pecked away at their flesh and pulled the corpses apart. At one point in time, 30 criminals were rotting together on the gallows in Augsburg, near Munich. Afterwards, they were tossed into small pits like garbage. Such perfunctory burials in unconsecrated ground were common.

It was hardly any more appetizing for those who were broken on the wheel. This was the most ignominious of all punishments. The torturer broke the offender's ribs and extremities before weaving him or her onto a wheel, which was then attached to a pole to allow the condemned to be raised into the air and placed on display. "There were individuals who survived this torture and were pardoned," says Auler.

Would-be assassin Robert François Damiens, who dared to attack King Louis XV, suffered even more. Bailiffs used sulfur to burn the hand that held the dagger. Pincers were used to tear flesh from his arms, breast and thighs, and molten lead was poured in the wounds.

They’re also learning about the executioners themselves:

Indeed, since executioners could neatly remove the feet of poachers, the hands of thieves and the fingers of perjurers, they were also skillful at removing diseased body parts. When branding criminals, they had to work expertly with a glowing-hot piece of iron and later rub gunpowder into the wound.

Despite their useful anatomical knowledge, executioners retained a sinister reputation. And though praised for doing "God's work" in the "Sachsenspiegel" ("Mirror of the Saxons"), a legal code drafted in the 13th century, most executioners were ostracized by society. They wore gloves because no one wanted to touch them.

What's more, they had no qualms about making sordid deals with body parts. They sold human fat and traded in pubic hairs, fingers and brain tissue as a basis for magic remedies. But their main job remained hanging. "Most death sentences were carried out with the noose," says Auler.

Be sure to read the entire article at Der Spiegel as there’s much more, including the ways in which witches and potential vampires were treated.

Image: Der Spiegel.

Many futurists predict that one day we'll upload our minds into computers, where we'll romp around in virtual reality environments. That's possible — but there are still a number of thorny issues to consider. Here are eight reasons why your brain may never be digitized.

Indeed, this isn’t just idle speculation. Many important thinkers have expressed their support of the possibility, including the renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil (author of How to Create a Mind), roboticist Hans Moravec, cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, neuroscientist David Eagleman, and many others.

Skeptics, of course, relish the opportunity to debunk uploads. The claim that we’ll be able to transfer our conscious thoughts to a computer, after all, is a rather extraordinary one.

But many of the standard counter-arguments tend to fall short. Typical complaints cite insufficient processing power, inadequate storage space, or the fear that the supercomputers will be slow, unstable and prone to catastrophic failures — concerns that certainly don’t appear intractable given the onslaught of Moore’s Law and the potential for megascale computation. Another popular objection is that the mind cannot exist without a body. But an uploaded mind could be endowed with a simulated body and placed in a simulated world.

To be fair, however, there are a number of genuine scientific, philosophical, ethical, and even security concerns that could significantly limit or even prevent consciousness uploads from ever happening. Here are eight of the most serious.

1. Brain functions are not computable

Proponents of mind uploading tend to argue that the brain is a Turing Machine — the idea that organic minds are nothing more than classical information-processors. It’s an assumption derived from the strong physical Church-Turing thesis, and one that now drives much of cognitive science.

But not everyone believes the brain/computer analogy works. Speaking recently at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis said that, “The brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it.” He referred to the idea of uploads as “bunk,” saying that it’ll never happen and that “[t]here are a lot of people selling the idea that you can mimic the brain with a computer.” Nicolelis argues that human consciousness can’t be replicated in silicon because most of its important features are the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells.

“You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you can’t compute it,” he said. “You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.” Image credit: Jeff Cameron Collingwood/Shutterstock.

2. We’ll never solve the hard problem of consciousness

The computability of the brain aside, we may never be able to explain how and why we have qualia, or what’s called phenomenal experience.

According to David Chalmers — the philosopher of mind who came up with the term “hard problem” — we’ll likely solve the easy problems of human cognition, like how we focus our attention, recall a memory, discriminate, and process information. But explaining how incoming sensations get translated into subjective feelings — like the experience of color, taste, or the pleasurable sound of music — is proving to be much more difficult. Moreover, we’re still not entirely sure why we even have consciousness, and why we’re not just “philosophical zombies” — hypothetical beings who act and respond as if they’re conscious, but have no internal mental states.

In his paper, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Chalmers writes:

How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, argues Chalmers, it is this one. Image: blog.lib.umn.edu.

3. We’ll never solve the binding problem

And even if we do figure out how the brain generates subjective experience, classical digital computers may never be able to support unitary phenomenal minds. This is what’s referred to as the binding problem — our inability to understand how a mind is able to segregate elements and combine problems as seamlessly as it does. Needless to say, we don’t even know if a Turing Machine can even support these functions.

More specifically, we still need to figure out how our brains segregate elements in complex patterns, a process that allows us to distinguish them as discrete objects. The binding problem also describes the issue of how objects, like those in the background or in our peripheral experience — or even something as abstract as emotions — can still be combined into a unitary and coherent experience. As the cognitive neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo has said, “Binding is thus seen as a problem of finding the mechanisms which map the ‘objective’ physical entities in the external world into corresponding internal neural entities in the brain.”

He continues:

Once the idea of consciousness-related binding is formulated, it becomes immediately clear that it is closely associated with two central problems in consciousness research. The first concerns the unity of phenomenal consciousness. The contents of phenomenal consciousness are unified into one coherent whole, containing a unified ‘‘me’’ in the center of one unified perceptual world, full of coherent objects. How should we describe and explain such experiential unity? The second problem of relevance here concerns the neural correlates of consciousness. If we are looking for an explanation to the unity of consciousness by postulating underlying neural mechanisms, these neural mechanisms surely qualify for being direct neural correlates of unified phenomenal states.

No one knows how our organic brains perform this trick — at least not yet — or if digital computers will ever be capable of phenomenal binding. Image credit: agsandrew/Shutterstock.

4. Panpsychism is true

Though still controversial, there’s also the potential for panpsychism to be in effect. This is the notion that consciousness is a fundamental and irreducible feature of the cosmos. It might sound a bit New Agey, but it’s an idea that’s steadily gaining currency (especially in consideration of our inability to solve the Hard Problem).

Panpsychists speculate that all parts of matter involve mind. Neuroscientist Stuart Hameroff has suggested that consciousness is related to a fundamental component of physical reality — components that are akin to phenomenon like mass, spin or charge. According to this view, the basis of consciousness can be found in an additional fundamental force of nature not unlike gravity or electromagnetism. This would be something like an elementary sentience or awareness. As Hameroff notes, "these components just are." Likewise, David Chalmers has proposed a double-aspect theory in which information has both physical and experiential aspects. Panpsychism has also attracted the attention of quantum physicists (who speculate about potential quantum aspects of consciousness given our presence in an Everett Universe), and physicalists like Galen Strawson (who argues that mental/experiential is physical).

Why this presents a problem to mind uploading is that consciousness may not substrate neutral — a central tenant of the Church-Turing Hypothesis — but is in fact dependent on specific physical/material configurations. It’s quite possible that there’s no digital or algorithmic equivalent to consciousness. Having consciousness arise in a classical Von Neumann architecture, therefore, may be as impossible as splitting an atom in a virtual environment by using ones and zeros. Image credit: agsandrew/Shutterstock.

5. Mind-body dualism is true

Perhaps even more controversial is the suggestion that consciousness lies somewhere outside the brain, perhaps as some ethereal soul or spirit. It’s an idea that’s primarily associated with Rene Descartes, the 17th century philosopher who speculated that the mind is a nonphysical substance (as opposed to physicalist interpretations of mind and consciousness). Consequently, some proponents of dualism (or even vitalism) suggest that consciousness lies outside knowable science.

Needless to say, if our minds are located somewhere outside our bodies — like in a vat somewhere, or oddly enough, in a simulation (a la The Matrix) — our chances of uploading ourselves are slim to none.

6. It would be unethical to develop

Philosophical and scientific concerns aside, there may also be some moral reasons to forego the project. If we’re going to develop upload technologies, we’re going to have to conduct some rather invasive experiments, both on animals and humans. The potential for abuse is significant.

Uploading schemas typically describe the scanning and mapping of an individual’s brain, or serial sectioning. While a test subject, like a mouse or monkey, could be placed under a general anesthetic, it will eventually have to be re-animated in digital substrate. Once this happens, we’ll likely have no conception of its internal, subjective experience. It’s brain could be completely mangled, resulting terrible psychological or physical anguish. It’s reasonable to assume that our early uploading efforts will be far from perfect, and potentially cruel.

And when it comes time for the first human to be uploaded, there could be serious ethical and legal issues to consider — especially considering that we’re talking about the re-location of a living, rights-bearing human being. Image credit: K. Zhuang.

7. We can never be sure it works

Which leads to the next point, that of post-upload skepticism. A person can never really be sure they created a sentient copy of themselves. This is the continuity of consciousness problem — the uncertainty we’ll have that, instead of moving our minds, we simply copied ourselves instead.

Because we can’t measure for consciousness — either qualitatively or quantitatively — uploading will require a tremendous leap of faith — a leap that could lead to complete oblivion (e.g. a philosophical zombie), or something completely unexpected. And relying on the advice from uploaded beings won’t help either (“Come on in, the water’s fine...”).

In an email to me, philosopher David Pearce put it this way:

Think of it like a game of chess. If I tell you the moves, you can faithfully replicate the gameplay. But you know nothing whatsoever of the textures of the pieces, or indeed, whether they have any textures at all (perhaps I played online). Likewise, I think, the same can be said with the textures of consciousness. The possibility of substrate-independent minds needs to be distinguished from the possibility of substrate-independent qualia.

In other words, the quality of conscious experience in digital substrate could be far removed from that experienced by an analog consciousness. Image: Rikomatic.

8. Uploaded minds would be vulnerable to hacking and abuse

Once our minds are uploaded, they’ll be physically and inextricably connected to the larger computational superstructure. By consequence, uploaded brains will be perpetually vulnerable to malicious attacks and other unwanted intrusions.

To avoid this, each uploaded person will have to set-up a personal firewall to prevent themselves from being re-programmed, spied upon, damaged, exploited, deleted, or copied against their will. These threats could come from other uploads, rogue AI, malicious scripts, or even the authorities in power (e.g. as a means to instill order and control).

Indeed, as we know all too well today, even the tightest security measures can't prevent the most sophisticated attacks; an uploaded mind can never be sure it’s safe.

Special thanks to David Pearce for helping with this article.

Top image: Jurgen Ziewe/Shutterstock.

I would love to hear your point about #4; I have my own thoughts, but am curious to know what you have in mind.

Remember, I never said any of these are *unsolvable* or intractable. Just throwing some ideas out there that could potentially be deal breakers.

The point of the article wasn't to discuss how we'll overcome these problems; I'm merely bringing them forward for discussion. Glad to see your remarks.