- A newly-released NBER working paper (w19430) quantifies how the fixed 20-year patent term skews cancer-drug R&D toward late-stage treatments with short trials and artificially long effective exclusivity, and proposes patent redesign, targeted subsidies, or surrogate trial endpoints to recover the life-years lost.

- Parallax has open-sourced the complete Verilog for the 8-core Propeller 1 microcontroller under an open license, along with ready-to-run FPGA images for Terasic DE0-Nano and DE2-115 boards, enabling open hardware verification and reuse.

- A participant demonstrated a Briel Computers Apple I replica that pairs a genuine 1 MHz 6502 CPU with a Propeller chip handling video terminal duties, illustrating immediate practical reuse of the newly opened Propeller design.

- Discussion surfaced that iGEM’s “BioBrick Public License” covers only a minority of sequences; most BioBricks are not freely downloadable, and physical distribution is restricted to registered teams paying ~US$3,500, prompting debate over the competition’s openness.

- A custom Python binary comparator, originally written for Pokémon ROM reverse engineering, was shared to help extract the longest common byte sequence from multiple files for mounting a cryptographic attack against PKZIP encryption.

- ParahSailin posted a refactor-in-progress of the UNAFold RNA-folding program (hybrid-ss-min.c), highlighting its reliance on global variables, memory leaks, and the need for -DINTEGER -DPRECISION=1000, sparking discussion about LLVM-based cleanup.

- The IEEE C95.1-2005 RF-exposure safety standard (3 kHz–300 GHz) was retrieved via paperbot for reference in bio-electromagnetics and wearable-device safety calculations.

- A concise YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUgEmezpS_E) explaining toehold-mediated DNA strand displacement was circulated to help newcomers grasp the mechanism central to many synthetic-biology circuits.