• A new paper proposes building a general-purpose biological computer by translating the classic silicon microprocessor architecture—ALU, control unit, memory, I/O, and interconnects—into engineered biological parts, offering a concrete roadmap for “wet” computing.

• A Swiss cryopreservation startup has €55 k seed funding and is deciding which animal system (pig, cow, rabbit, rat, or snail) to preserve first using fresh cadaver tissue to generate publishable data and raise €1–10 M in the next round while sidestepping live-animal regulations.

• Participants circulated Canavero’s Surgical Neurology International paper and a QZ article claiming the first human head transplant is now technically feasible, alongside Boston University Collins Lab publications, framing the debate around surgical, immunological, and ethical feasibility.

• RNA-interference therapeutics were dissected: key limitations include short in-vivo half-life, immune reactions to lentiviral vectors, and difficulty silencing targets like APOE; promising fixes include morpholino-modified oligos and rapidly cleared biodegradable lipid nanoparticles detailed in a Nature Molecular Therapy paper.

• The community’s open-science workflow was on display: pdfparanoia improvements for stripping watermarks, Zotero translators and translation-server for automated bibliography ingestion, and Paperbot routinely liberating pay-walled studies on ablative laser propulsion, RNAi gene therapy, and synthetic-biology part characterization.

• BTNB, a new open biology lab, is under construction but faces practical hurdles—ergonomic bench design, lack of a shipping address for reagents, and absent leadership—prompting discussion of the minimal skill set undergraduates need to contribute (molecular cloning, data-driven SEO for product naming, etc.).

• Frustration over the absence of a “Journal of Negative Results” highlighted systemic academic incentives that suppress publication of failed experiments, seen as a barrier to reproducible DIY-bio and translational research.