- Alessandro Delfanti’s new book “Biohackers. The Politics of Open Science” profiles DIYbio communities in LA/SF but is met with skepticism over its portrayal of Craig Venter as an open-access advocate given his patent-heavy track record.  
- NIH has updated its recombinant-DNA guidelines, now forcing UC Berkeley labs to file Biological Use Authorizations for any work with synthetic nucleic acids or antibiotic-resistance constructs.  
- The Open Source Hardware Association’s “OSHW Doc Jam” released only process notes and meeting minutes under CC-BY, disappointing participants who expected an actual hardware file-format or interoperability standard.  
- Two low-level mesh-networking tools—bunny (a steganographic 802.11 traffic shaper) and the B.A.T.M.A.N-adv kernel module—were highlighted as building blocks for resilient, covert mesh networks.  
- Scott Aaronson’s blog post “D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge” was shared, reinforcing the channel’s long-standing skepticism toward D-Wave’s quantum-computing claims.  
- Micro-hybrid N₂O rocketry experiments were discussed; polycarbonate (PIC) was ruled out as a fuel grain because it doesn’t burn hot enough, and the exrocketry.net “ARocket” archive was posted to trace John Carmack’s early involvement.  
- A Nature paper on hypothalamic control of systemic aging was circulated, emphasizing roles for IKK-β, NF-κB, and GnRH and positioning the brain as a potential master regulator of lifespan.  
- CureTogether, a crowdsourced symptom-tracking platform, was noted to have been acquired by 23andMe, signaling consolidation in consumer health-data services.  
- Two foundational performance references—Ulrich Drepper’s “What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory” and Doug Lea’s scalable malloc design notes—were shared to support optimization of bioinformatics and AI workloads.