- A UBC team engineered microbes to express a balsam-fir gene that produces fragrance precursors, offering a sustainable, animal-free replacement for ambergris and potentially lowering the cost of high-end perfumes.  
- The Open Source Brain initiative scheduled a 13–15 May workshop in Alghero, Sardinia, to unveil a public repository of detailed neuron and network models across species and brain regions; early GitHub code was criticized for poor Python quality.  
- A new Nature Biotechnology paper presents a community-driven global reconstruction of human metabolism, accompanied by the searchable Human Metabolism database (humanmetabolism.org) that links metabolites to specific biochemical reactions.  
- A publicly accessible, remote-controlled Tecan liquid-handling robot (heavybio.dyndns.org:8088) was demonstrated online, with an explicit safety prompt warning users that “ROBOT ARMS WILL MOVE!!” before activation.  
- Monte-Carlo simulations estimated a 0.08 % chance that comet C/2013 A1 will impact Mars in 2014; participants calculated its 4.2 × 10¹⁵ kg mass and discussed using existing orbiters or a James-Cameron-launched probe for stereoscopic imaging.  
- Anecdotes from early MIT Media Lab culture described how Steve Mann’s superior hardware skills led to social ostracism, and his reluctance to release reproducible designs reportedly impeded collaborative hardware development.