- The 2010 Blue Brain Project claim of simulating a mouse neocortical column was re-examined; participants noted the lack of subsequent peer-reviewed publications and cited a 2011 EPFL progress page as the only public update.  
- Amazon Web Services offers academic grants of up to $15 k in EC2 credits for open-access research; the group weighed the trade-offs between on-premise 64-core AMD Opteron clusters (192 GB RAM) and AWS virtualized instances for finite-element neural simulations.  
- A low-cost DIY refractometer for urinalysis and blood analysis was proposed, combining a webcam, LED, prism, and lens, with an upgrade path to a back-thinned camera and concave grating for simultaneous spectral data.  
- Methods for large-scale iOS app-ad decryption were discussed, including memory dumping via gdb on jailbroken devices, FairPlay key extraction, and using an untethered-jailbroken Apple TV 2 as a headless Ethernet server.  
- A newly announced “Certificate in Transhumanism” program—requiring only a 2–3-minute video or ten JPEG memes plus a 750-word longevity advice file—was sharply criticized for trivializing serious transhumanist discourse.  
- A recent PNAS paper identifying FOXO as a proliferation factor (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/11/09/1209714109) prompted sharing of a curated diyhpl.us reading list covering human centenarian genetics, therapeutic targeting, and oxidative-stress pathways.