- Japanese scientists are seeking regulatory approval to create animal-human hybrid embryos for research, a move that could accelerate xenotransplantation and developmental biology studies.  
- Harvard’s BioNumbers database (bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu) was highlighted as a curated source of quantitative biological data useful for metabolic and systems-biology modeling.  
- A discussion clarified that “gene cassettes” are functional clusters of genes (often operons or enzyme sets), not literal microfluidic cassettes, resolving a terminology confusion.  
- Counter Culture Labs is scouting real-estate—including a neighboring church—to establish a permanent community bio-lab in the Bay Area.  
- A crowdfunding campaign is being planned to fund porting the Atheros TDMA Wi-Fi driver from FreeBSD to Linux under GPL so that OpenWRT can retain Ubiquiti-style star-topology mesh performance.  
- Portland DIYbio meetups are using hands-on demos (e.g., strawberry DNA extraction) and seeking simple animations that show how detergents disrupt lipid bilayers to solubilize membranes.  
- A Pierce protein-detergent screening kit (ten 10 mL high-purity detergents for $305) was praised as a convenient reagent set for membrane-protein work.  
- Joseph Jackson’s 50-minute “Revolution in Science” talk (YouTube links provided) became fodder for a proposed humorous remix/roast, illustrating community in-jokes about transhumanist evangelism.  
- Practical tooling notes: msysgit plus Console2 gives a tolerable Bash shell on Windows; GitHub for Windows and Cygwin were offered as alternatives.