- Twist Bioscience’s DNA synthesis platform uses high-density silicon plates (9,000+ wells per plate) and conventional phosphoramidite chemistry, not a fundamentally new synthesis mechanism.  
- DNA 2.0’s “IP-Free” gene fragments are encumbered by restrictive licensing terms (item 10 of their T&C) and the company appears to have abandoned its trademark application for the phrase, raising open-source community concerns.  
- A concise crash-course PDF and two short videos were shared as an introduction to elliptic-curve cryptography for non-cryptographers.  
- A review paper on optogenetics (“Making sense of optogenetics”) was circulated to help newcomers grasp the technique’s principles and experimental design.  
- A critical VMware vCenter remote-code-execution exploit (CVE-2015-2342) was highlighted for anyone running lab virtualization infrastructure.  
- Discussion of microfluidics prototyping lamented the labor-intensive PDMS molding process and questioned why hobbyist photography/optics experts aren’t tapped for rapid optical prototyping.  
- A curated GitHub repository of speech- and language-processing resources was linked for NLP experimenters.  
- GearGenerator.com, an online tool for designing and simulating custom gears, was noted for mechanical prototyping projects.