- A Nature Communications paper on “mind-controlled gene switches” sparked debate over sensationalism and possible misuse, with participants noting the surprising acceptance of such work into a high-impact journal.  
- kanzure released a toy Bitcoin project demonstrating correct handling of blockchain reorganizations (reorgs), arguing that most early Bitcoin services failed because they lacked rollback logic; the discussion produced a concrete attack model in which a miner with >50 % hashrate can re-org six or more blocks, void deposits, and keep withdrawals unless withdrawals are cryptographically linked to every deposit.  
- The BioHack Academy announced a 10-week bootcamp (17 Feb 2015, Waag Society FabLab) teaching participants to build open-source biofactories and produce biomaterials.  
- Nick Szabo’s 1995 “macroscale replicator challenge” resurfaced: build a self-replicating Lego-scale machine from off-the-shelf parts; Chris Phoenix’s 1998 follow-up proposed a UV-cured-liquid-plastic pool system with fluidic-logic control.  
- pdfparanoia, an open-source tool by kanzure, surgically removes watermarks from academic PDFs by manually editing compressed object streams; it tolerates occasional structural invalidity that most readers still accept.  
- Participants recommended optimistic, biology-focused science-fiction titles—Greg Egan’s “Teranesia,” “Chaff,” Diaspora, and Permutation City; Ted Chiang’s “Understand”; Joan Slonczewski’s “The Brain Plague”; Paul Di Filippo’s “Ribofunk”—and lamented the scarcity of rigorous, non-dystopian transhumanist fiction.  
- DIY nutrition discussion critiqued Soylent’s carb-heavy formula and poor oils; the diy.soylent.me/recipes web tool was highlighted as a community-driven spreadsheet for custom, nutritionally balanced meal-replacement mixes.  
- The “Uncertain Future” Monte-Carlo AI-risk simulator (Java applet) was mentioned, with screenshots archived at diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/theuncertainfuture.  
- Tor exit-node fingerprints offering free JSTOR access were shared as part of ongoing censorship-circumvention efforts.