- A 2013 open-access paper (PMC3687527) mined the largest human cognitive-performance dataset to date, yielding new lifestyle and aging-related predictors of mental performance.  
- Participants debated the difficulty of micronutrient tracking: vitamins A and D can remain sub-clinically low for months, while B12 deficiency can persist undetected for years.  
- High-resolution (60 nm) X-ray tomography of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (PMC363052) was showcased as a method for full 3-D imaging of living yeast, enabling detailed morphological studies.  
- A Science Translational Medicine study (10.1126/scitranslmed.3008681) demonstrated in-pig creation of a biological pacemaker via minimally invasive somatic reprogramming, pointing toward gene-therapy alternatives to electronic implants.  
- SeedWaterSegmenter—an open-source Python toolkit—was introduced for user-guided segmentation and time-lapse tracking of surface-labeled living cells, lowering the barrier to quantitative cell biology.  
- Bitcoin’s low-friction micro-payments were credited with enabling captcha-solving marketplaces (cheapcaptcha.com, deathbycaptcha.com) by streamlining both customer payments and worker payouts.  
- The gradle-witness plugin was circulated as an open-source defense against Java supply-chain attacks, pinning every dependency with a SHA-256 checksum during the build process.  
- Channel members traced Moxie Marlinspike’s shift from repeatedly breaking SSL/TLS to founding Open Whisper Systems (TextSecure/RedPhone) and separately highlighted the Moxiebox secure-sandbox project on GitHub.  
- Commercial “secure” phones (Blackphone, Silent Circle) were dismissed as insufficient; participants insisted on fully open-source basebands and auditable RF transceivers before trusting any handset.  
- The LibreSSL fork was praised for pruning and simplifying OpenSSL’s codebase, while the absence of unit tests in major TLS implementations was decried as a cultural failure in security engineering.