- Luke Parrish’s “Better Cryonics” proposal (bettercryonics.com) outlines a new low-cost, high-quality route to human cryopreservation that the channel flagged as worth tracking.  
- Parallella’s $99 Zynq-7020 + 16/64-core Epiphany board was framed as a scalable, air-cooled 3-D torus lattice capable of real-time simulation of ~20 k biologically realistic neurons via 8 GB/s FPGA links and custom MPI routing.  
- DARPA and UPMC demonstrated direct cortical control of a prosthetic arm by a tetraplegic subject, with tactile feedback and a fully wireless interface identified as the next engineering milestones (video linked in log).  
- iGEM Edinburgh’s failed limonene-producing yoghurt was dissected as a case study in metabolic engineering, illustrating that even single-enzyme insertions require extensive promoter tuning, codon optimization, and pathway balancing to reach detectable titres.  
- Practical biohacker logistics: Sudo Room (Oakland) offers power tools but no reliable package reception, whereas BioCurious provides a package-receiving service for lab parts and laser-cut materials.  
- A cautionary blog post (http://www.iamdailyn.com/2013/02/15/magnet-implants-can-actually-be-pretty-annoying) was shared to temper enthusiasm for DIY magnet implants by cataloguing day-to-day annoyances.  
- Cloud-storage economics were compared: Amazon Redshift quoted $1 k/TB-year for 16 TB with a $24 k upfront fee, while Mega.co.nz offered 4 TB for $25/month but required a 20 TB minimum commitment.