- Open Source Ecology is allocating $1.2 M to create open-source CAD/CAM tooling for hardware design, beginning with FreeCAD and interviews with lead developer Mike Apostol.  
- The BIOFAB project is concluding two years of E. coli synthetic-biology work; expression-level and reliability data for newly designed promoters, 5' UTRs, and terminators are being consolidated into a unified, publicly accessible database and web tool.  
- A reproducible lab workflow—design → construct → verify → sequence-check → transform → flow-cytometry analysis—has been prototyped using BioConductor R libraries and automated .fcs file ingestion, though integration remains partial.  
- Community members are experimenting with home sonoluminescence using ultrasonic transducers and are sharing safety and reproducibility notes.  
- The Brain Preservation Foundation has achieved 501(c)(3) status and lists Sebastian Seung on its advisory board, aiming to improve brain-banking protocols beyond formalin fixation.  
- Dmitry Itskov’s “Avatar 2045” roadmap—human brain-controlled robots, brain transplants into androids, and eventual mind uploading—was circulated from a PopSci write-up of the Moscow GF2045 congress.  
- DIY magnet implants are being refined: a Netherlands hacker reported 8-month biocompatibility with a 7 mm NdFeB disc coated in Sugru, and a group buy of parylene-coated magnets is circulating for fingertip placement.  
- Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can now be generated from autologous fibroblasts alone, eliminating the need for mouse embryonic fibroblast feeder layers, with plans to bank personal iPS lines in liquid nitrogen.  
- Participants debated YAML vs. JSON for human-readable configuration, highlighting PyYAML’s three-year-old unclosed feature request for ordered dictionaries as a barrier to reproducible science and transhumanist data pipelines.