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Inside a rectangular lab in a boxy office park in Melbourne’s north is a black server cabinet. Inside that cabinet are what appear to be boxy white computers, except for an unusual front display reading out temperature and oxygen concentration.

Inside each of those boxes is yet another container – a small glass Petri dish studded with electrodes. And inside that dish is a delicate matrix of human brain cells, pulsing with electricity.

These boxes are the first commercially available human-computer hybrids. Wetware, the sci-fi writers call this technology, computer hardware made of flesh and b

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