• Chinese researchers report isolating the magnetoreceptor protein Isca1, enabling “magnetogenetics”—non-invasive magnetic control of neurons—while iGEM teams from Kyoto, Taipei, Toronto, Copenhagen and others have already prototyped magnetic-field-responsive gene circuits, magnetosome formation in E. coli, and BRET readouts, providing an open-source toolkit for magnetically controlled cells.

• Synthetic biology’s “BioBrick” paradigm is criticized as an engineering cargo-cult; practitioners instead favor Gibson assembly and context-aware methods because living cells are noisy, non-linear systems whose behavior is hard to predict from simple Lego-like parts.

• The community identifies cheap, fast DNA synthesis (< $500 benchtop machines) and rapid design–build–test cycles—not sequencing—as the next bottleneck; directed-evolution techniques such as in-vitro compartmentalization and emulsion-based selection are highlighted as the most reliable route to functional biomolecules when rational design fails.

• Xenotransplantation pipelines are moving from concept to clinic: pigs with α-1,3-galactosyl-transferase knockouts plus human complement regulators are being raised as living bioreactors for human lungs, and United Therapeutics is running trial NCT02234128 to recondition marginal donor lungs inside dome incubators.

• Brain–computer interface discussion centers on flexible carbon-nanotube electrode arrays that match neural tissue impedance and may eliminate the 2–3 month failure window of rigid microelectrodes, while participants lament the absence of high-resolution whale-brain micrographs and call for open, on-demand brain atlases.

• Productivity debates contrast “interrupt-driven firefighting” with “non-interrupt planned execution,” recommending GTD (Getting Things Done) and lightweight tools like jotmuch for bookmarking and piny for git-based static wikis to decouple planning from execution.

• 3-D printing advances include DNA-adhesive colloidal gels that extrude centimetre-scale scaffolds containing living cells and “bitblox”/“soldercubes” printable digital materials for modular electromechanical robots.

• Radical cryobiology and cognition experiments are proposed: selective breeding of pigs (or “supersized hamsters”) for accelerated growth and immunological compatibility, breeding small animals for cryoprotectant resistance, and shrinking the brains of high-cognitive species (cephalopods, corvids) while preserving performance to create minimal, scannable connectomes.