- Participants debated the likely social impact of rapid advances in bioscience, predicting that groups who have “resigned themselves to believing that technology will never help them get what they want” (e.g., deep-green environmentalists and the furry subculture) will be caught off-guard and react with confusion or hostility.  
- The conversation highlighted a perceived categorical error among radical environmentalists who oppose GMO crops and thorium breeder reactors, with participants arguing that these technologies could actually reduce ecological damage and that opposition is driven more by anti-corporate sentiment than by technical assessment.  
- Cryonics was discussed as a near-term priority; kanzure suggested focusing on “vitrification of brain tissue” and “verifying that scanning works,” and pointed to Ken Hayworth’s Brain Preservation Prize as a concrete initiative to advance the field.  
- A new open-source biology blog, DIY Spartan Biotech (diyspartanbiotech.wordpress.com), was briefly noted as an emerging resource, though it was described as “not much here yet.”  
- Technical side-projects mentioned include an in-progress Python MCMC (Markov-chain Monte Carlo) sampler, questions about evaluating multivariate Gaussian PDFs in R, and a web-scraping tool called Webnumbr that tracks numeric values on arbitrary pages and can alert users when thresholds are crossed.