• The “radiator theory” of human brain evolution—claiming that a unique cranial-vein network lifted a thermal ceiling on brain size—was examined and largely rejected after participants reviewed recent papers showing that cerebral blood flow keeps cortical tissue well below the 43–44 °C damage threshold, making heat dissipation an unlikely evolutionary driver for encephalization.  

• A thermodynamic rebuttal paper, “Constancy and trade-offs in the neuroanatomical and metabolic design of the cerebral cortex,” was highlighted; it argues that metabolic and wiring-efficiency constraints, not temperature, limit brain scaling and explains why white matter would balloon unsustainably if functional-area number increased unchecked with gray-matter volume.  

• Discussion pivoted to broader constraints on intelligence: if no hard limits existed, every lineage with neurons should converge on general intelligence, so unidentified architectural or energetic bottlenecks must be at play—participants speculated that capillary-network geometry or developmental nutrition could be such bottlenecks.  

• Practical microfluidics questions arose about interfacing a deep (>100 µm) PDMS mixer chip to a shallow (~30 µm) detection chip; using a syringe needle instead of tubing was suggested for sterility, chemical resistance, and incompressibility, though no consensus on optimal coupling emerged.  

• Y Combinator announced that its current biotech batch receives $20 k of free Transcriptic cloud-lab credits, positioning the robotic wet-lab platform as “AWS for biology,” while noting that most commercial reagents still require separate purchase.  

• Reverse-engineering efforts for Tecan liquid-handling robots were referenced, including the open-source Perl library Robotics::Tecan (CPAN) authored by jcline; undisclosed but “obvious and destructive” security flaws in the library were mentioned.  

• A new aggregator site, biohacklabs.org, was criticized as redundant and dismissive of existing DIYbio coordination efforts; background was provided on the defunct diybio.eu portal and failed attempts to revive it.  

• Participants shared links on the metabolic cost of neural information (Laughlin et al., 1998) and on ventromedial prefrontal volume correlating with social-network size, underscoring ongoing interest in quantifying energetic and anatomical limits of cognition.