• The Human Brain Project (HBP) held a launch webcast for its new computing platforms, announced at https://webconf.vc.dfn.de/hbp-platforms.  
• A Science paper reported the discovery of a bacterium that can metabolize and degrade PET plastic, offering a potential biological route to plastic waste remediation (DOI: 10.1126/science.aad6359).  
• Google Exacycle was highlighted as a resource for large-scale protein-docking simulations, discussed on Hacker News at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377134.  
• SpaceX’s upcoming launch of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), an inflatable space habitat, was noted along with its Wikipedia entry for technical background.  
• The concept of Wafer-Scale Integration (WSI)—building an entire super-chip on a single silicon wafer—was introduced as a path to lower-cost, massively parallel supercomputers.  
• A blog post on “gravitational balloons” (http://gravitationalballoon.blogspot.com/2013/03/introduction-to-gravity-balloon.html) sparked debate over the efficiency of using concentric friction-buffer shells to create artificial gravity, with criticism that turbulent flow might outperform laminar designs and that devoting mass solely to gravity generation is wasteful.  
• The rr-project (http://rr-project.org/) was shared as a tool for deterministic, reversible debugging and “timeless debugging” demonstrated in a USENIX Enigma 2016 talk.