In 1907, Duncan MacDougall put dying patients on a scale. William Blake's 1805 illustration for Scottish poet Robert Blair's poem The Grave imagines the soul rising from the body at death. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's a little complicated to weigh a dying person on a hospital bed, but that didn't matter to Duncan MacDougall. In the early 20th century, MacDougall's unique, purpose-built scale was ready to receive test subjects.

Elon Musk's Nueralink will not be testing its brain implant on humans anytime soon - the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has rejected the company's application. The agency outlined dozens of issues the company must address before human testing, a critical milestone for final product approval, Neuralink staffers told Reuters. The concerns include the device's lithium battery; the potential for the implant s tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue, the employees said. Musk applied in early 2022, but staffers said the company co-founder has yet to solve all the problems - even though the billionaire revealed human trials would start in six months back in November. Three staffers said they were skeptical the company could quickly resolve the issues.

The US Department of Transportation (DOT) is said to be investigating Elon Musk's Neuralink over claims the company illegally transported hazardous pathogens. The probe is in response to allegations from the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM), which state Musk's company unsafely packed and moved implants removed from the brains of monkeys that may have been infected. PCRM, an animal-welfare advocacy group, wrote to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg earlier on Thursday to alert it of records it obtained on the matter from the University of California (UC) Davis, according to Reuters. The letters state that the implants were not properly sanitized and packaged, thus carrying pathogens that could cause serious health issues in infected humans. The lasted investigation follows months of allegations against Neuralink, which is said to have violated animal welfare laws with'botched experiments.'

An advocacy group of more than 17,000 doctors has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to disqualify Elon Musk's Neuralink from receiving approval for its brain implant. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) claims Neuralink has violated the'good laboratory practices' (GLP) regulations, which ensures the quality and integrity of non-clinical laboratory studies, with its'hack job' surgeries and staff'manipulating data.' Some of the animal's deaths were at the hands of Matthew McDougall, the head neurosurgeon, who administered nearly six times the amount of an unapproved'toxic' substance that led to a monkey's death, a former Neuralink employee told DailyMail.com. This was stated in messages written by John Morrison, the study director at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), Merkley added. Elon Musk said his Neuralink is seeking FDA approval to start human trials, but a group is trying to block these efforts.

'Botched experiments' by Elon Musk's Neuralink allegedly'kept suffering animals alive for no reason and malpractice caused monkey's brains to hemorrhage' during rushed brain chip testing, a former Neuralink employee and internal lab notes reveal. The billionaire's startup is accused of violating the Animal Welfare Act with its experiments at the University of California, Davis, from 2017 through 2020, which'sacrificed all the animals involved,' a former Neuralink employee, who asked to remain anonymous, told DailyMail.com. One case stood out to them- a monkey sacrificed ahead of schedule due to errors allegedly made during surgery. 'There was no reason to use it,' the former employee, who worked as a necropsy technician, told DailyMail.com. 'BioGlue was not FDA-approved for brain surgery and would never be able to be carried over to human trials.

Neuralink plans to test its brain machine interface technology with four of its N1 chips installed under patients' skin. Neuralink, Elon Musk's startup that's trying to directly link brains and computers, has developed a system to feed thousands of electrical probes into a brain and hopes to start testing the technology on humans in in 2020, Chief Executive Elon Musk revealed Tuesday. "A monkey has been able to control a computer with his brain," Musk said at a San Francisco livestreaming the presentation on YouTube Tuesday, revealing even more research results than the company's scientists expected. Neuralink's initial goal is to help people deal with brain and spinal cord injuries or congenital defects, Musk said. The technology could help paraplegics who have lost the ability to move or sense because of spinal cord injury -- a medical treatment that's a lot less shocking than radical sci-fi ideas like "consensual telepathy."

You're awake, you're sentient, you might even be upright. You're not comatose or dead, and it's reasonable to assume that if you were on some kind of powerful mind-altering drug then you wouldn't be reading this. The point is, you're here, and you're alive, so therefore you're conscious. OK then, since you're conscious and I'm conscious and everyone else is conscious, go ahead. Does it belong to the mind or the body, or does it exist outside both? Is consciousness part of our souls, or does it live in the things we create – our art, our music, our cities and wars? Could it be mechanical or electronic, and, if so, what makes it operate? Most pressingly of all, is it possible we have now made for ourselves a new kind of consciousness, one which exists independently? If so, then what the hell have we got ourselves into? The search for a definition of consciousness must lay claim to be the world's longest-running detective story. We've had our best minds on it ever since we developed brains big enough to ask questions and, still, we seem to be stumped. Plato and Aristotle couldn't fix it; Kant, Hume and Locke tried different angles; Schroedinger, Heisenberg and Einstein remained in awe before it. None of them came up with the final formula, the definitive, nailed-it for ever, silences-all-critics answer. Lately though, the hunt seems to have changed gear. Despite big differences about how best to conduct the search and where to look, several of the most persistent sleuths have found themselves disconcertingly close to agreement. No-one is yet at the stage when they are ready to call a press conference and announce to the world they have finally apprehended the suspect, but they have at least begun to converge on these two leads: the Omega Point and the Singularity. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is an improbable prophet, partly because he's dead, and partly because he's still associated with a famous palaeontological fraud.