- A LaTeX paper-in-progress explores Bitcoin miner incentives: miners may prioritize high-fee transactions to drain the fee pool competitors could capture, and short-term miners could manipulate block timestamps just before a difficulty retarget to lower the next period’s difficulty and boost their own revenue.  
- Participants questioned the viability of relaying Bitcoin transactions given weak incentives and potential legal liability, citing GitHub issue bitcoin/bitcoin#2653 as the focal reference.  
- Kickstarter campaign “miniPCR – A DNA Discovery System for Everyone” was highlighted as an open, consumer-grade biotech hardware example aimed at democratizing molecular biology.  
- The glymphatic system—recently discovered brain-wide waste-clearance pathway active during sleep—was discussed, with University of Rochester press releases linked to explain how cerebrospinal fluid flushes metabolic toxins from neural tissue.  
- Debate on eliminating human sleep: participants weighed the “anti-Überman” idea of monophasic sleep once per week against polyphasic schedules, while noting chronic deprivation’s links to stress responses and transient psychosis, and speculated on whether maximizing waking hours or maximizing sleep would yield longer life-spans.  
- A PLOS Biology paper “Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex” was shared, showcasing advances in decoding neural signals into intelligible speech.  
- Counterparty and Overstock’s plan to issue securities on a Bitcoin side-chain was discussed, including Patrick Byrne’s remarks on building an SEC-compliant Alternative Trading System, while participants mocked proposals like storing daily Quantified-Self heart-rate data on Ethereum or archiving entire genomes on-chain via “genecoin.me.”  
- Technical CAD kernel links circulated: Parasolid, OpenNURBS, Siemens JT-Open, cloud MCAD startup OnShape, plus screenshots of verb-nurbs.com and OpenJSCAD, reflecting ongoing interest in open-source and cloud-native mechanical design tools.