- Cleverpet, a cognitive-training device for dogs and cats, is generating large-scale performance datasets that could enable the first genome-wide association studies of trainability and intelligence in companion animals.  
- The Glowing Plant Kickstarter raised $484 k by pre-selling 20 % of its goal in person, including a rumored $10 k from Cambrian Genomics, but after the campaign Kickstarter banned GMOs as rewards, illustrating the shifting regulatory landscape for bio-hackers.  
- OpenWorm’s $100 k Kickstarter for a digital C. elegans simulation is struggling despite most code already being written, highlighting the difficulty of crowdfunding open-source biology projects.  
- Lift Labs’ tremor-canceling spoon for Parkinson’s patients uses active stabilization and has passed rigorous shake-table testing, demonstrating how consumer-grade assistive tech can be engineered for neurological disorders.  
- Counterparty, a Bitcoin-based “smart property” platform, has shut down its own IRC server and migrated to #xcp on Freenode, reducing infrastructure overhead for decentralized finance projects.  
- The FDA’s new priority-review voucher program rewards developers of neglected-disease drugs with a transferable fast-track ticket now being auctioned by Knight Therapeutics for tens of millions of dollars.  
- The ILIAD Project Indiegogo campaign offers open-source hardware and protocols for citizen scientists to screen novel antibiotics at home, extending the DIY-bio toolkit to antimicrobial discovery.  
- Channel members debated the “Magna Cortica,” a speculative legal framework that would restrict unlicensed brain self-modification, raising questions about who controls cognitive liberty in a transhumanist future.