• A request was made for the nitrogen-fixing endosymbiont Acetobacter diazotrophicus, a bacterium naturally found in sugarcane, to be shipped to a participant; the only available labs had cotton and peanut collections rather than sugarcane strains.  
• Discussion highlighted the desire to make human blood donations obsolete, framed as both a convenience issue and a broader transhumanist goal.  
• The MIT Press book “Advances in Artificial Life, ECAL 2013” was shared as a new academic resource covering cutting-edge artificial-life research.  
• A Georgetown University paper on Tor deanonymization (“Users Get Routed”) was circulated, focusing on vulnerabilities that allow real-world identification of Tor users.  
• Two new open-source tools were released on GitHub: a Python-to-VBA wrapper and “vba-linux,” aimed at automating or replacing legacy VBA macros in cross-platform environments.