- UK government announced a £40 million synthetic-biology fund and Warwick University received £12 million to create a new synthetic-biology center, as reported in Chemistry World and local press.  
- Transcriptic, the robotic “cloud biology lab,” posted new job openings for scientists and engineers, prompting discussion about applying.  
- kanzure proposed adding “continuous DNA synthesis” to the open-source bio roadmap: instead of batch-mode oligo synthesizers, use spatial-light-modulation arrays plus magnetic-bead handling to flush finished strands and keep every pixel synthesizing nonstop.  
- nmz787 scoped the hardware needed for a whole-mouse-brain electrical interface: ~7.5 million recording sites on a 40 µm lattice, achievable with high-channel-count ADCs such as TI’s 256-channel AFE0256 (~$80 in 1 k volume) rather than $20 k FPGAs.  
- C. elegans connectome was cited as a tractable test case—302 neurons, ~100 sensory/motor I/O—suggesting a 1 000-electrode array driven by commodity microcontrollers or small FPGAs.  
- Links shared: “Applied Crypto Hardening” PDF (bettercrypto.org), Adam Marblestone’s MIT thesis on neural interfaces, Nature Physics paper on physical reservoir computing (doi:10.1038/nphys3233), and an NPR story on the microbial ecology of paper currency.