Jared Genser in many ways fits a certain Washington, D.C., type. He wears navy suits and keeps his hair cut short. He graduated from a top law school, joined a large firm, and made partner at 40. Eventually, he became disenchanted with big law and started his own boutique practice with offices off--where else--Dupont Circle. What distinguishes Genser from the city's other 50-something lawyers is his unusual clientele: He represents high-value political prisoners.

Gertrude the pig rooted around a straw-filled pen, oblivious to the cameras and onlookers -- and the 1,024 electrodes eavesdropping on her brain signals. Each time the pig's snout found a treat in a researcher's hand, a musical jingle sounded, indicating activity in her snout-controlling nerve cells. Those beeps were part of the big reveal on August 28 by Elon Musk's company Neuralink. "In a lot of ways, it's kind of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires," said Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, of the new technology. Neuroscientists have been recording nerve cell activity from animals for decades. But the ambitions of Musk and others to link humans with computers are shocking in their reach.

BERLIN – A turning point for Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at New York's Columbia University, came when his lab discovered it could activate a few neurons in a mouse's visual cortex and make it hallucinate. The mouse had been trained to lick at a water spout every time it saw two vertical bars, and researchers were able to prompt it to drink even with no bars in sight, said Yuste, whose team published a study on the experiment in 2019. "We could make the animal see something it didn't see, as if it were a puppet," he said in a phone interview. "If we can do this today with an animal, we can do it tomorrow with a human for sure." Yuste is part of a group of scientists and lawmakers, stretching from Switzerland to Chile, who are working to rein in the potential abuses of neuroscience by companies from tech giants to wearable startups.

Bobby Kasthuri has a problem. In an effort to understand, on the finest level, what makes us human, he's set out to create a complete map of the human brain: to chart where every neuron connects to every other neuron. The problem is, the brain has more connections than the Milky Way has stars. Just one millionth of the organ contains more information than all the written works in the Library of Congress. A map of the brain would represent the single largest dataset ever collected about anything in the history of the world. Making that map seems like a task that could consume not just one lifetime, but dozens.

Learning about animal behavior just became way easier. Researchers from Columbia University have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that can filter spam in hours of video footage to learn about the life of the pond-dwelling hydra. The hydra is related to coral, jellies and sea anemones. It doesn't have a backbone or a brain, but it moves, feeds and runs from predators. The life of a hydra is so predictable that a computer can recognize its life patterns with ease.

The pond-dwelling Hydra is not a very complex little animal but it does have a complex repertoire of moves that aren't clear until after extensive human observation. Examining these moves took a long time and scientists were never sure that they had seen all of them. Now, thanks to an algorithm used to catch spam, researchers have been able to catalog all of the Hydra's various moves, allowing them to map those moves to the neurons firing in its weird little head. "People have used machine learning algorithms to partly analyze how a fruit fly flies, and how a worm crawls, but this is the first systematic description of an animal's behavior," said Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University . "Now that we can measure the entirety of Hydra's behavior in real-time, we can see if it can learn, and if so, how its neurons respond."

Rafael Yuste thinks neuroscientists have been looking at the brain too close. "It's just like a TV screen--if you're watching a movie and could only look at an individual pixel, you would never understand what's going on," he says. "What neuroscientists have been doing since [the father of neuroscience, Santiago Ramon y] Cajal, is looking at the single pixels of the brain--one neuron at a time. So that's why we need these methods to see the whole screen, to see what's playing in our brains." The methods in question were on display in a recent study he and his graduate student, Christopher Dupre, conducted, recording the activity of all neurons in the Hydra vulgaris, a centimeter-long hydroid, while the animal swam between two pieces of glass.

The firing of every neuron in an animal's body has been recorded, live. The breakthrough in imaging the nervous system of a hydra – a tiny, transparent creature related to jellyfish – as it twitches and moves has provided insights into how such simple animals control their behaviour. Similar techniques might one day help us get a deeper understanding of how our own brains work. "This could be important not just for the human brain but for neuroscience in general," says Rafael Yuste at Columbia University in New York City. Instead of a brain, hydra have the most basic nervous system in nature, a nerve net in which neurons spread throughout its body.

While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devices or social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothing less than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer, reports Tristan Quinn. "Within the next 30 years," promises Dmitry Itskov, "I am going to make sure that we can all live forever." It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more useful to humanity. "I'm 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn't have started it," he says. It is a breathtaking ambition, but could it actually be done?