- IDT and iGEM announced a $1 million collaboration to support synthetic-biology projects, signaling growing corporate interest in open biotech.  
- A field report on land-snail diversity in Uruguay was shared (PDF: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bio/uruguay-snails.pdf), illustrating grassroots data collection by hobbyist naturalists.  
- Discussion of Bitcoin’s scaling debate centered on Segregated Witness (SegWit) as a soft-fork capacity increase versus contentious hard-fork proposals; links to explanatory slides and the Lightning Network site were provided.  
- A Google-slides deck on the block-size controversy (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1k3ctUAqaCRMFgNnB5qpBuETMFYwsToMwHpgfrnjButU) was drafted for a non-technical audience, with feedback on improving diagrams.  
- Multiple open-source RISC-V CPU implementations were catalogued, including Rocket Chip, PicoRV32, VScale, and BOOM, highlighting the ecosystem’s rapid expansion.  
- A Hacker News thread on writing effective decompilers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11221868) was circulated for reverse-engineering enthusiasts.  
- An upcoming “9th Global CAISPN Call” on open-source spaceflight and commercial-space applications was promoted via Google+ event link.