- A BBC report on a canine spinal-cord study showed that transplanting olfactory-ensheathing glial cells into paralyzed dogs restored partial walking ability, offering a promising route toward human therapies.

- Oxford’s Brain journal released never-before-seen photographs of Einstein’s cerebral cortex, sparking debate over the scientific value and reproducibility of post-mortem neuroanatomy.

- Participants discussed the technical limits of Focused Ion Beam (FIB) serial-section imaging for reverse-engineering integrated circuits, emphasizing material-dependent sputter rates and the need for precise calibration to preserve 3-D fidelity.

- A detailed protocol for vapor-phase silanization of silicon wafers with FDTS (1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluorodecyltrichlorosilane) was shared to create low-stiction molds for soft-lithography PDMS micro- and nanofluidic devices, with comparative notes on shorter-chain fluorinated and non-fluorinated alternatives (FOTS, PETS, TMCS).

- A $20-per-hour open-access lab offering oxygen-plasma cleaning, contact lithography, and FIB services was identified as a resource for rapid microfabrication prototyping.

- The GoodFET-based “Facedancer11” USB device-emulation board was introduced, enabling host-side Python scripts to impersonate arbitrary USB peripherals for security fuzzing and driver testing, with Travis Goodspeed’s blog and firmware cited as key documentation.

- A custom chirped diffraction-grating mask with line widths down to 100 nm is under iterative design; the latest 50 000-pixel bitmap (100 nm pitch) will be etched onto a substrate, though optical-diffraction simulation is still needed to validate performance rather than relying on visual appearance.

- The current “best-looking” grating spans 3 000 lines from 1.5 µm to 4 µm with an average pitch of 400 nm, but half the lines are compressed into the first 10 µm, highlighting the challenge of balancing density and optical quality.

- High-resolution vector files (SVG) for the mask strain Inkscape and can crash browsers; a PNG fallback (http://fennetic.net/irc/chirp_mask/chirp_bw_k1e-05_gamma1.7.png) is provided for etching while the SVG remains the authoritative source.