- Magnetoelectric nanoparticles (doi:10.2217/nnm.15.52) were presented as a new non-invasive route for both brain stimulation and imaging, while the long-delayed FDA approval of the BrainPort tongue-display vision aid was met with skepticism about regulatory timelines.  
- The open-source nanotech CAD package “NanoEngineer-1” has been archived in a chroot environment to prevent bit-rot, and participants expressed hope for a community revival of the project.  
- A speculative experiment was outlined: serially infect mice with brain-dwelling bacteria, then breed the strains that correlate with improved rodent intelligence scores—an evolutionary-selection path toward “microbial nootropics.”  
- Counter-arguments emphasized that microbes are hard to control, must evade immune clearance, and lack the structural precision needed for neural interfacing; cryonics and large-scale electrode arrays (~10⁹ bidirectional µm-scale probes) were judged more realistic enhancement paths.  
- Gut–brain signaling was discussed: Lion’s Mane mushroom polysaccharides may raise brain BDNF, and the gut’s total neurotransmitter mass can sequester precursors, yet the group noted the absence of region-specific tracing methods for microbial metabolites.  
- Directed-evolution strategies remain under-used in biotech; microfluidic “single-cell traps” could iteratively select bacteria for desired morphologies or faster wound-healing phenotypes before re-applying enriched strains.  
- Engineered lentiviral vectors retargeted to the coxsackievirus-and-adenovirus receptor (CAR) on presynaptic terminals can retrogradely transduce spinal motor neurons after simple intramuscular injection in mice, offering a minimally-invasive route for CNS gene therapy in motor-neuron diseases.  
- In vitro validation confirmed CAR-targeted vectors efficiently transduce receptor-positive cell lines and primary motor neurons in compartmented microfluidic cultures, verifying axonal retrograde transport and neuron-specific labeling.  
- A separate study found that insulin up-regulates a memory-related synaptic protein in rat cortical neurons by promoting AMPA-receptor endocytosis, linking metabolic signaling to synaptic plasticity mechanisms (full paper: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tsan-Ju_Chen/publication/261408690_Insulin_can_induce_the_expression_of_a_memory-related_synaptic_protein_through_facilitating_AMPA_receptor_endocytosis_in_rat_cortical_neurons/links/54e80e800cf25ba91c7ad389.pdf).