• A 520-million-year-old Cambrian arthropod, *Fuxianhuia protensa*, exhibits a modern tripartite brain and nested optic neuropils, indicating that advanced arthropod neuroanatomy—and the visual behaviors it supports—evolved far earlier than previously thought.

• Chris Harrison’s “Tomo” project uses low-cost electrical-impedance tomography to enable camera-free gesture recognition, pointing toward inexpensive, non-optical human-computer interfaces.

• Genetically engineered diatom biosilica from *Thalassiosira pseudonana* can be functionalized with IgG-binding domains to create modular “backpacks” that ferry drug-laden nanoparticles to specific cancer cells, offering a new targeted-chemotherapy platform.

• Stroma Medical has completed 37 iris-color-change procedures in Mexico and Costa Rica: a 20-second laser disrupts stromal pigment, which the body clears over weeks, turning brown eyes blue for ~US$5,000.

• A Nature Communications paper presents “ultrastructurally smooth thick partitioning and volume stitching,” multibeam SEM, and conjugate light-electron array tomography as scalable methods for whole-circuit connectomics.

• Participants in OpenWorm’s Google-Hangouts journal-club on whole-brain emulation criticized the shift away from IRC and the use of Twitter for questions, underscoring ongoing friction between open, synchronous collaboration and broadcast-style outreach.

• Experimental evolution of fruit flies in 35 % oxygen environments yields progressive body-size increases, supporting the hypothesis that Carboniferous gigantism was driven by elevated atmospheric O₂ levels and diffusion limits.

• Historical computing resources shared include Konrad Zuse’s lectures on the Z1–Z4 machines and exploratory-engineering documents on von Neumann probes and Dyson-sphere “matrioshka brains,” framing long-term visions of self-replicating space infrastructure.

• Galileo’s scaling argument was revisited: muscle energy per unit mass is size-independent, so jump height is nearly constant across scales—debunking the myth that a flea-sized human could leap thousands of feet.

• David Beazley’s PyCon 2015 talk “Python Concurrency From the Ground Up: LIVE!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4) was recommended for understanding low-level async and threading primitives in Python.