- A Defense One article on Pentagon “brain-hacking” research (http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/07/breakthrough-checkered-history-military-brain-hacking/87709/) sparked calls for an open-source civilian replication effort so that DARPA does not monopolize advances in neural interface technology.  
- Participants debated the ethics of withholding an experimental $244 enzyme treatment from a child with an ultra-rare genetic disease, arguing that excessive deference to FDA approval can itself become a life-threatening moral calculus.  
- Technical discussion of ketogenic diets for glycation disorders emphasized keeping total carbohydrates below ~50 g/day (ideally near zero) and highlighted the heightened complexity of managing ketosis in Type 1 diabetics.  
- A self-experiment showed that replacing saturated dairy fat with unsaturated nut fat (pecans, etc.) improved insulin sensitivity and produced a lipid profile of HDL 175 mg/dL and total cholesterol ~231 mg/dL, prompting a critique of the traditional lipid hypothesis and statin-centric medicine.  
- Industrial seed-oil processing (bleaching, deodorizing, ammonia treatment) was condemned for producing oxidized, non-metabolizable fats that drive oxidative stress, whereas nuts deliver fatty acids in protective lipid bilayers rich in vitamin E and other antioxidants.  
- Naturally occurring trans fats in grass-fed dairy (vaccenic acid, conjugated linoleic acid) were distinguished from synthetic trans fats, and participants shared sourcing tips for 100 % grass-fed milk in upstate New York (Battenkill Creamery, Cheese Farmer).  
- Whole-genome sequencing for familial-cancer studies was priced at roughly $1 k per person for 10× coverage using one lane of Illumina HiSeq per sample, with an eight-lane minimum per run.  
- A parsing challenge—extracting Murata part numbers from differently formatted strings—was solved with regular expressions after BLAST was jokingly proposed.