- A BoingBoing comment thread prompted debate on public perception of transhumanism, with participants noting that critics often conflate voluntary enhancement with coercive eugenics and dystopian singularitarianism, concluding that the term “eugenics” is too loaded for productive discourse.  
- A BBC article on a gene variant that delivers large fitness gains from only three minutes of intense exercise per week was shared, sparking discussion on using personal genomics to guide lifestyle and even mate selection.  
- Technical routes to muscle enhancement were compared: electroporation vs. microneedle arrays for plasmid delivery, diffusion of follistatin/myostatin blockers between fibers, and Fc-fusion proteins to extend half-life from hours to weeks; two active clinical trials were cited (NCT01519349 for follistatin AAV gene therapy and NCT01099761 for ACVR2B-Fc fusion).  
- Ben Nortier’s open-source web-based 3-D CAD tool Shapesmith.net was highlighted; it off-loads OpenCASCADE boolean operations to an Erlang server and renders results with WebGL, illustrating open-source hardware design workflows.  
- Evolutionary music generation was explored via darwintunes.org (DarwinTunes) and tones.wolfram.com, proposing a crowdsourced up-vote/down-vote selection mechanism analogous to Electric Sheep’s fractal evolution.  
- A consultant working on Peter Diamandis’ “Abundance” project described empirical dashboards tracking global metrics for energy, food, water, freedom, education, and shelter, with a personal focus on energy data rather than 3-D-printing narratives.  
- The Russia 2045 initiative was introduced through a fightaging.org link, framing the day’s discussion within broader life-extension and transhumanist goals.