• A widely-shared BBC article claiming to have created an “organic computer” by linking two rat brains was criticized as hype; participants argued the setup cannot solve non-Turing-computable problems and questioned the scientific rigor of the claims.

• The paper behind the rat-brain interface proposes scaling the concept to a grid of reciprocally connected human brains, with the primary somatosensory cortex identified as a promising target for future neural interfaces.

• Channel veterans warned against launching yet another transhumanist forum, citing past failures such as transhumani.com and thetranshumanist.com/forum, and urged contributors to focus on concrete open-source hardware and documentation instead.

• Practical DIY transhumanist projects dominated the discussion: low-cost biosensors (EMG, heart-rate, glucose, EEG, NIRS), microcontroller prototypes, and open documentation were emphasized over abstract community building.

• Google Glass (Explorer v1) was evaluated as a wearable display; participants noted it lacks on-device facial recognition, would require cloud off-loading for recognition tasks, and predicted an impending “gold rush” of third-party cloud video-parsing services once such wearables become common.

• Hardware-accelerated computer vision on mobile devices was debated: OpenCV’s Intel optimization makes it poorly suited to ARM processors, prompting discussion of CUDA, silicon-level SIFT, and integral-image sensors for real-time, low-power vision.

• Consumer and open-source medical hardware links were shared, including the Myo armband for EMG gestural control, the CoaguChek XS INR meter (with $100–$400 eBay/Alibaba units versus $295 test strips), and grassroots logistics exemplified by Backyard Brains shipping from the All Hands Active hackerspace.

• Research papers circulated: PNAS on neuron lifespan vs organismal lifespan, PLOS ONE on sugar and diabetes, and Scientific Reports on real-time sensorimotor brain-to-brain sharing; archives of Alexander Chislenko and Anders Sandberg’s early transhumanist writings were rediscovered.