• Human-animal chimeric embryos are already being used to grow human organs inside pigs and sheep; UC Davis and other labs have initiated dozens of pig-human and sheep-human pregnancies, while a 2015 NIH moratorium on funding such work—motivated by fears that human brain cells could alter animal cognition—is now being challenged by a Science editorial calling for the ban to be lifted.

• A $169 11-inch Intel Atom quad-core laptop (2 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC, 1366×768) was dissected as a case study in extreme hardware cost reduction; participants concluded that 2 GB RAM + 32 GB storage is the new floor for usable $200-class Windows tablets, with eMMC (≈50 MB/s) beating HDDs but still lagging SSDs, and future low-cost devices likely shifting to M.2 PCIe for faster I/O.

• A Cypress FX3 USB-3.0 dev board paired with an 80 MSPS, 16-bit AD9269 ADC is being designed for high-speed side-channel capture (TEMPEST, keyboard RF, etc.) with direct PC streaming; meanwhile, the Rigol DS1054Z scope’s LAN interface was judged too slow for continuous streaming, useful only for dumping long memory captures.

• PS/2 keyboards radiate a ~16 kHz clock signal that can be reconstructed; debate ensued over whether 96 kHz pro-audio sound cards (with possible anti-alias filtering) or 1 Msps MCU setups suffice for reliable capture, and a Polish paper on reconstructing printed pages from laser-printer RF emissions (wil.waw.pl) was circulated, prompting a technical review of xerography physics.

• Metallic-hydrogen superconductor claims were met with skepticism; participants argued that diamond-based or Joe Eck’s materials (superconductors.org) offer more credible routes to room-temperature superconductivity, while an MIT Sloan article on novel financing models for radical cancer-cure research was shared as background reading on funding high-risk biomedical innovation.