- Electrolaser feasibility: participants concluded that a 100 W CO₂ laser is insufficient; efficient air-ionization requires far higher power density and UV wavelengths, citing the OSA paper “Channeling the electrical breakdown of air by optically heated plasma filaments.”  
- Microwave alternative explored: replacing the nanosecond laser with a microwave beam was considered, but sub-millimetre focusing and poor irradiance make it impractical.  
- Hardware accessibility: 4 kW commercial CO₂ lasers (56 kW wall-plug) and femtosecond units from vendors like Laser Quantum are now off-the-shelf, lowering the barrier to high-energy short-pulse experiments.  
- Expansion microscopy commercialized: Ed Boyden’s MIT spin-out Expansion Technologies Inc. (@EXT_Bio, extbio.com) began distributing expansion-microscopy kits and services.  
- Crypto-biotech financing: BioViva issued company shares on the Waves blockchain to fund gene-therapy R&D, an early example of tokenized biotech fundraising.  
- Neuro-imaging data flood: NIH’s Human Connectome Project released 9.5 PB of multimodal brain-imaging data (resting-state/task fMRI, high-res structural MRI, diffusion) at humanconnectome.org.  
- Privacy concerns: IEEE Spectrum article “Brain Scanning Just Got Very Good—and Very Unsettling” was circulated, highlighting the societal implications of ultra-high-resolution neuro-imaging.  
- Robotics advance: paper “Learning to Act by Predicting the Future” (arXiv:1606.09205) shared, detailing new robot-control methods based on predictive models.