'Synthetic Biological Intelligence': PLAYING GOD IN A PETRI DISH

PLAYING GOD IN A PETRI DISH: THEY ARE GROWING HUMAN BRAIN CELLS TO RUN COMPUTERS

Patti Johnson

Human brain cells running computers? The first reports were easy to dismiss because fake news is everywhere. AI-generated stories and images look real and get used to stoke fear with lies. The research now leaves no room for doubt: they are growing living human brain cells and wiring them into computers.

A company in Melbourne takes a few drops of donated human blood, or a scrap of skin. These starting cells are not taken from an aborted baby. In the lab the cells are reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells, the kind that can become almost any tissue. Those stem cells are then steered into becoming neurons, living cells that fire the way brain cells fire. About 800,000 of those neurons are grown on a small silicon plate covered with tiny metal contacts in each unit. A computer signals the living tissue with electricity. The tissue answers with electricity. Software treats that exchange as computation. If the cells do what the operators want, they receive a smooth electrical pattern (They call it a reward). If they miss, they receive noise (They call it punishment). Over hours and days the living culture changes its firing and gets better at the task. That is how it works and it is no longer only a theory.

Australia-based Cortical Labs recently debuted the world’s first biocomputer, priced at $35,000 per unit.

From Pong to Biological Data Centers: The Rapid Progression of Living Neurons

In October 2022 the journal Neuron published the first famous proof. The Melbourne team, working with what they called DishBrain, showed that about 800,000 lab-grown neurons, some human and some from mice, could learn a simple paddle game called Pong when wired to a simulated game world. [1]

The company behind that work is Cortical Labs, founded in Melbourne in 2019. In 2023 TechCrunch reported that the firm had raised money to push the same living cells toward artificial intelligence. [2]

In March 2025 they put a commercial box on the market called the CL1.

Each unit is a small aquarium for brain cells with a computer plugged in. Price: $35,000.

IEEE Spectrum described it as a shoebox-sized biological computer: living human neurons on a chip, kept alive with pumps, food, temperature control, and waste removal for up to about six months. [3]

Each CL1 is one self-contained device. Think of it as a small aquarium for brain cells with a computer plugged into it.

In August 2026 Singapore showed a working prototype cabinet at the National University of Singapore, first about twenty of the boxes, described in the press as millions of living human neurons processing information instead of ordinary computer chips. [9] [10]

The company calls it synthetic biological intelligence. The street name is wetware.

Melbourne is where the commercial product was born, but the same idea is already alive in other countries.

In Vevey, Switzerland, a company called FinalSparkgrows tiny clusters of human brain cells, called organoids, and lets researchers around the world rent time on them through the internet. ScienceAlert described an array of sixteen of those mini-brains wired to electrodes. [11]Nature later surveyed the whole field of computers that run on human brain cells.[12]

In August 2026, a U.S. startup called Parasma said human brain cells could predict the next word in a sentence in controlled tests. That is the same basic job a language model does. A language model is software that runs on computer chips. Tools like ChatGPT and Grok work this way. They learn from text and guess what word should come next. The company’s founder had earlier worked with Cortical Labs on a demo that trained brain cells to play Doom. [13]

THE SPIRITUAL CHARGE: MAN PLAYING GOD

The technical story is only the surface. Underneath it is a rebellion as old as the Garden of Eden with new tools.  The apple is the living brain chip.

From Genesis forward, the human being is not raw material. A person is made in the image of God. Humans are not just meat that computes and is manufactured as a product line. This means that there is a line that humans should not cross.

Transhumanism walks up to that line and calls the crossing progress. It says the body is an outdated operating system. It says aging is a bug. It says that the mind is a pattern you can copy, grow, house in a cabinet, and rent. It says if nature gave us neurons, we are allowed to farm them, wire them, punish them with noise, reward them with pretty signals, and sell the result as a greener computer.

That is not humility. That is priesthood without God. The lab coat becomes the vestment. The incubator becomes the altar. The donor’s blood becomes the offering. And the public is told to be grateful because the new idol uses less electricity than a graphics card.

The Bible’s warning about this spirit of idolatry and pride. The builders of Babel said, “Let us make a name for ourselves.” The serpent’s first sales pitch was, “You will be like God and know good and evil.” Every age finds a new brick. Ours is a living chip.

The Bible teaches that some powers are not ours to take even if we can take them. Ability to do something is not permission. “We can grow brain cells in a dish” does not answer whether living human brain tissue should be treated as a server. That matter is spiritual before it is technical.

If those neurons are only cells, we have still treated the human form as spare parts for industry. Either way the posture is the same. Man appoints himself creator of life.

You do not have to guess at the religion behind this. The most famous popular historian of the tech age has been saying it in print for a decade. Yuval Noah Harari titled a book Homo Deus, Latin for “Man God.” He was not being cute. [17]

“I titled the book Homo Deus because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities, in particular the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.”

That line and others like it are collected here: https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/yuval-noah-harari-quotes

“Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”

“In the twenty-first century, the third big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus. So we may well think of the new human agenda as consisting really of only one project (with many branches): attaining divinity.”

At the World Economic Forum at Davos, Harari said:

“When biotechnology, nanotechnology and the other fruits of science ripen, Homo sapiens will attain divine powers and come full circle back to the biblical Tree of Knowledge. Scientists will upgrade us into gods.”

“In the coming decades, AI and biotechnology will give us godlike abilities to reengineer life, and even to create completely new life-forms. After four billion years of organic life shaped by natural selection, we are about to enter a new era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design. Our intelligent design is going to be the new driving force of the evolution of life and in using our new divine powers of creation we might make mistakes on a cosmic scale.”

[18]  In 2023 he told India Today, “Homo sapiens are in the process of becoming gods.” [19]

Read those sentences slowly. This is not a preacher putting words in a scientist’s mouth. This is the house intellectual of Davos describing the project in the project’s own language.

Create life. Upgrade the species. Take the apple. Become gods.

Harari also admits the trade. He has written that modernity is a deal: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power. That is the spiritual price tag. You get the dish that plays Doom. You lose the idea that a human life is holy.

Transhumanism does not need to kick down church doors. It only needs people to accept that a person is a pattern, that a neuron is a part, and that the highest good is more computation at lower wattage. Once that creed is normal, growing brain tissue in a cabinet stops looking like sacrilege and starts looking like infrastructure.

A Warning Already Being Preached 

Podcaster Ashley Hays makes some good points:

“They built an entity that is utilizing human cells to power and advance the AI layer. Future data centers will now be built utilizing these what they call CL1 biological computing chips being run by human cells. And this is what they call wetware.”

“The beast system will be run by the human nervous system because that’s the goal. Transhumanism. Satan wants to corrupt God’s creation, but also in the process utilize the human nervous system because anything that he creates cannot compare.”

“The end goal is a counterfeit creation. Human beings are the wetware that keep it running.”

That last sentence is the spiritual core. Scripture does not need a computer science degree to recognize the pattern. Genesis 6 and the words of Jesus in Matthew 24 say the last days would look like the days of Noah: not only violence, but a defiling of kinds, a mixing of what God separated.

You do not have to accept every end-times timeline to hear the moral alarm. If the beast system in Revelation 13 is a world order that brands people so they can buy and sell, then the machinery that matters is not only a tattoo or a chip. It is a culture that already treats the human nervous system as infrastructure. First the dish. Then the implant. Then the claim that you cannot live, heal, work, or pay without joining the hybrid.

Ashley’s video description says it clearly: “The system/infrastructure that would support humans being merged with a mark in order to buy or sell is being set up as we speak. Know Jesus NOW.” [20]

The lab paper and the warning are talking about the same bricks. One side calls the bricks synthetic biological intelligence. The other side calls them a counterfeit of the image of God.

Every project of this kind uses the same lullaby to lull us to sleep. It is only a prototype. It is only research. It is only a few hundred thousand cells, and a real brain has 86 billion. Come back when it is serious.

That is how every irreversible thing begins. In vitro fertilization was sold as only for barren couples before it became an industry that freezes, sorts, and discards human embryos by the million and now is selling the human embryos for research. Gene editing was supposed to be therapy for terrible disease before it became about designer children. The internet was a library before it became a surveillance and propaganda machine. The early stage is the stage where the moral question has been ignored.

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The Sound of Grace: Rosh Hashanah, The Shofar, And The Search For Divine Assurance

The Sound of Grace: Rosh Hashanah, The Shofar, And The Search For Divine Assurance

Derrall Bellaire 

The piercing sound of a ram’s horn echoing through a concrete underpass in Toronto at the Walk with Israel this past June is not an experience I will soon forget. The crowds of Jews and supporters cheered as they walked. The Shofar blast inspires joy, remembrance, and an intricate, ancient spiritual connection to the Jewish people.

The ram’s horn is not only an ancient symbol of Jewish identity, it was also set to serve as a spiritual alarm clock, given by God to awaken the heart and remind the Jewish people of spiritual truths so often forgotten.

In Leviticus 23, the Feast of Trumpets, one of “God’s appointed times,” was taught to the people as an observance of sabbath rest, a memorial of blowing the trumpets, and a Holy convocation to the Lord. The combination of rest, remembrance, and holy gathering is a powerful observance as the Jewish people prepare for the new year. 

At one of the greatest times of revival in Israel’s history, we see the feast of Rosh Hashanah in action as God calls His people back to Himself and His law. In Nehemiah, we read of the return of the people of Judea to their homeland to rebuild the temple. This action was not only permitted, but also blessed by a pagan king, Artaxerxes of Persia, the world’s most powerful figure. Under the leadership of Nehemiah, many Jewish people returned, the ancient wall was rebuilt, and in the 7th month, the returned people of Israel called upon Ezra and the priests to teach them the long-forgotten book of the law (Nehemiah 8:1-12).

The feast of trumpets, Rosh Hashanah, had been abandoned, and in keeping with human tendency, the people had forgotten their God and the spiritual callings that God had set them apart to fulfill. In Nehemiah 8, we read that the people wept at the realization that they had not only failed to walk in His ways, but had entirely forgotten His Law. 

In Jewish tradition, Rosh Hashanah not only marks the Jewish New Year, but also a time of reflection and divine judgment for the actions of the past year. Traditional Jewish thought holds that all people are judged on Rosh Hashanah, with their decree sealed shortly after on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. 

Within the context of divine judgment, the sounding of the shofar stands as the primary good deed (mitzvah) of Rosh Hashanah. For traditional Judaism, blowing and listening to the shofar is believed to accrue divine merit, helping secure inscription in the Book of Life. Consequently, this practice bridges traditional ritual with a meaningful opportunity to improve one’s standing before God and invoke divine mercy.

But for the believer, our hope is not in trumpet blowing or a scale of “mitzvot.” On our own strength, our good deeds can never make us right with the Father. The punishment for even one sin is eternal separation from God. Yet, just as the lamb was slain on Passover in the temple, the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, was slain for us to give us the righteousness that we are incapable of earning. For those who believe in Jesus Christ and walk with Him, your name is written in the Book of Life for salvation—not for the balancing of your works on a scale, but for assurance with unerasable penmanship that we are sealed in Jesus Christ by the blood of the Lamb and His ultimate “mitzvot.”

When we hear the shofar today, let it remind us of the coming Rapture and the victorious return of the Jewish Messiah, Jesus Christ. On that day, Zechariah 12:10 says that the Jewish people will “look upon Me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son.” 

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Netanyahu offered to join strikes against Houthis, stop advance, US source claim

Netanyahu offered to join strikes against Houthis, stop advance, US source claim

JERUSALEM POST STAFF

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed that Israel may join a broader campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthi terror group in Yemen, Lebanese newspaper Al Akbar claimed on Friday, citing US sources. 

According to the report, Israel would be joining a larger regional effort to combat the threat to shipping routes in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait.

US diplomatic sources claimed that Netanyahu offered Israeli aid to countries in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Akbar wrote, signaling that Israel may be willing to join a broader war. 

This comes as the Houthis advance in western Yemen, reaching the strategic island of Perim in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, potentially tightening their grip on one of the world's vital shipping routes.

Official warns Houthi control over al-Mandab could be worse than Hormuz

An Israeli official warned that Houthi control over the Bab al-Mandab Strait could lead to a more dangerous situation than the one in the Strait of Hormuz while speaking to N12 on Friday.

The official pointed to the gap in size between the Bab al-Mandab Strait and the Strait of Hormuz, saying that where the Houthis are, they would be able to fire on ships without relying on advanced radar systems.

“They will be able to fire at whatever they want with anti-tank missiles. They will be able to see the ships with their own eyes,” the official said, adding that the situation "gives enormous power to the terror organization."

Israel continues to monitor Houthi movement

Israel is closely monitoring Houthi movements following the group’s capture of the Yemeni port city of Mocha, near the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait, Maariv reported on Thursday.

Israeli officials are concerned that the Houthis could consolidate their control over the port, enabling them to increase pressure on oil tankers and commercial vessels in the area. Such a development could disrupt shipping into the Red Sea and further threaten regional trade and energy routes.

A military source said Israel was closely monitoring the fighting in Yemen and shifts in the balance of power along the coast.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir and Israel Navy commander V. Adm. Eyal Harel issued direct warnings to the Houthis and Iran this week.

“We removed and pushed back existential threats that had been built up against us for years,” Zamir said. “We will not allow existential threats to emerge from radical enemies, and we will not allow terrorist organizations to establish themselves along our borders.”

Addressing Israel Navy operations, Zamir added, “In Bab al-Mandab, in the heart of Beirut, in Lebanon’s ports and off the coast of Gaza, we proved that the IDF’s long arm is powerful, determined and reaches everywhere to strike those who seek to harm us.”

“In the new maritime arena, there is no longer such a thing as a distant front,” Harel said, stressing that distance would not provide immunity to anyone seeking to harm Israel.

Iran, Houthis block 2 key global shipping routes, straining the global economy

Iran, Houthis block 2 key global shipping routes, straining the global economy

Kim Hjelmgaard, Miles J. Herszenhorn, Ramon Padilla, Janet Loehrke and Michael Loria,

ran and its allies are ramping up operations to disrupt major oil shipping lanes in the Middle East on which much of the world relies, threatening to drive up U.S. and global fuel prices further.

Iranian forces responded to President Donald Trump and Israel's Feb. 28 attacks on the country by disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which lies between Iran's coast and the Arabian Peninsula. The Islamic republic's efforts made the channel a household name as oil prices rose precipitously.

This week Iran's allies to the south moved to shut down the other major channel in the region: the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which lies between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. The Yemen-based Houthi militia announced Sept. 11 that they had seized Perim Island, a strategic isle that will allow them to control the Bab el-Mandeb.

The Houthis' capture of Perim means Iran and their allies have effectively consolidated control over two of the most important trade chokepoints in the world, and the strain on the global economy that followed shipping disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz is now poised to grow worse.

In addition to Gulf oil exports, the two channels are used for shipping consumer goods and other commodities between Asia, Europe and beyond. Disruptions at these routes have driven up oil prices and shipping costs, creating ripple effects across the U.S. economy that extend far beyond the gas pump.

World leaders and experts have warned that continued disruptions to trade could eventually cause a global recession where tens of millions of people go hungry.

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Tehran Turns Its Rage on Christians, Branding Them “Zionists”

Tehran Turns Its Rage on Christians, Branding Them “Zionists”

Tamar Stein

Iran has spent the past year fighting a war with Israel and the United States, absorbing sweeping new sanctions, and putting down a civilian uprising that left tens of thousands dead. In the middle of that upheaval, the Islamic Republic has also escalated a campaign against a population that poses it no military threat at all: its own Christian minority.

Multiple sources, ranging from evangelical ministries with contacts inside Iran’s underground church to United Nations human rights investigators, describe the same pattern accelerating through 2026, even as they differ sharply on the numbers.

Texas-based Iran Alive Ministries, which trains house-church leaders and broadcasts Christian programming into Farsi-speaking homes, told Baptist Press in August that at least 33 ministers connected to its network have been killed in recent months and approximately 131 others arrested. Fourteen remain imprisoned, some on death row. Of roughly 176 people in that tally, the ministry could publicly name only 20, four of them among the dead; 156 identities remain withheld. Founder Hormoz Shariat called the figures “just a snap picture of the people connected to Iran Alive.”

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research institute, situates those numbers within a documented legal and political pattern rather than as an isolated wave. A February report by researchers Janatan Sayeh and Samuel Ben-Ur cited a joint study from Article 18, Open Doors, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, and Middle East Concern showing arrests on religion-related charges nearly doubled in 2025 compared to 2024, with more than twice as many Christians sentenced to prison, exile, or forced labor. 

The escalation traces to a specific trigger: after Israel and the United States defeated Iran militarily in the 12-Day War of June 2025, Tehran turned on its Christian minority as a scapegoat. Arrests of Christians totaled 40 from the start of 2025 through the war’s end in June; in the single month that followed, authorities arrested at least 53 more. Iran’s own Ministry of Intelligence stated its justification openly, claiming it had detained 53 Evangelicals “trained abroad” for collaborating with the “Zionist regime.”

That accusation is not incidental. Christianity Today reported in April that Iranian house churches are already routinely branded “Zionist” by the regime, a label that leaves converts especially exposed as diaspora opposition figures like Reza Pahlavi gain prominence. The persecution is written into Iranian law: Article 500 of the penal code, which bars worship seen as interfering with Islamic law, was used in nearly 90 percent of 2025 cases against Christians and carries up to ten years in prison after a 2021 amendment. 

Muslim converts face a harsher charge still, “moharebeh,” or enmity against God, which carries a potential death sentence. The FDD report names Judge Ashkan Ramesh of the Varamin Revolutionary Court as a central enforcer of the harshest sentences, and calls for the United States to sanction him along with the Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization, the state body that brands missionary Christianity a “Zionist” project. The crackdown extends beyond Christians: Iran’s Baha’i minority recorded more than 750 “persecutory acts” between June and November 2025, and Iranian Jews were also arrested, with community leaders interrogated.

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