- A new minimalist C. elegans physics simulator written in Common Lisp (SBCL) with lispbuilder-sdl was released; the worm is modeled as point masses connected by springs, and with a small timestep and better integrator it can approximate rigid bodies, enabling experiments with soft robots or sea-star morphologies (code and demo at http://anonymousdelivers.us/49074 and http://rghost.net/46101857).

- Participants discussed GPU acceleration for such simulations, pointing to OpenWorm’s PCI-SPH OpenCL code and asking whether any “compile-to-GPU” frameworks akin to Theano exist for automatically generating optimized CUDA kernels.

- A PNAS paper was highlighted showing that over-expressing Parkin during aging reduces proteotoxicity, alters mitochondrial dynamics, and extends lifespan (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1216197110).

- Sci-Hub (sci-hub.org) was praised as an effective proxy/cache for bypassing journal paywalls, but its current practice of failing to strip publisher watermarks exposes source universities; kanzure offered the open-source script pdfparanoia (https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia) to remove identifying watermarks.

- The channel debated the nutritional merits and risks of Soylent, noting its omission of sulfur, vague ingredient list, and cavalier attitude toward micronutrient forms; jrayhawk argued the macro ratio is not inherently dangerous but warned that its low-residue formulation may starve gut flora and disrupt hormonal/immune signaling.

- DNA/RNA computing was revisited: while a bucket of DNA offers ~Avogadro’s number of parallel “processors,” real-world use is crippled by extreme crosstalk and poor signal-to-noise, and most proposed applications (even SAT solvers) are not worth the overhead.

- A 2009 paper on “Modelling amorphous computations with transcription networks” was shared (http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ellington/Modelling%20amorphous%20computations%20with%20transcription%20networks%20-%202009.pdf), and participants critiqued the “transcriptional logic” analogy as largely forced.

- Practical DNA-tile computing ideas resurfaced: encoding arbitrary computations as DNA tiles is considered feasible, but designing problems that tolerate the system’s noise characteristics remains an open challenge.

- Archive strategies were discussed: Google’s cache links have become unreliable, Coral Cache and archive.org are now preferred fallbacks, and an example Lego Mindstorms tutorial was recovered via Wayback (http://web.archive.org/web/20120724222211/http://www.rjmcnamara.com/lego-minstorms/).