- IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) is soliciting very-short transhumanist fiction without a submission deadline; participants debate whether to contribute despite the lack of payment.  
- A brief critique of IEET and James Hughes’ book “Citizen Cyborg” is offered, alleging the organization shifted the World Transhumanist Association toward social-welfare-oriented messaging.  
- A Science paper (Ramamoorthi et al., DOI: 10.1126/science.1208049) is highlighted, showing that the transcription factor Npas4 in the hippocampal CA3 region is necessary for contextual fear memory formation in mice.  
- DIYbio safety resources are shared: the iOS “Chemical Compatibility Database” app and the diybio.org biosafety page.  
- A FreeBSD telnetd buffer-overflow vulnerability allowing remote root code execution is noted, with links to the security advisory and Hacker News discussion.  
- An extended technical discussion of Martian terraforming evaluates using nuclear explosives to liberate CO₂ and water; quoting Martyn Fogg’s “Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments,” it concludes ~4 billion 0.7-megaton devices (≈ $10¹⁵) would be required—far exceeding available volatiles and global economic capacity.  
- Alternative terraforming ideas—crashing Phobos/Deimos or employing self-replicating ISRU chemical plants—are dismissed as insufficient or more practical but still inadequate.  
- Neuroscience Q&A clarifies that action potentials propagate without longitudinal charge movement; instead, transverse ionic currents across the axonal membrane trigger adjacent depolarization, with Scholarpedia’s “Saltatory conduction” article provided as reference.