• A HOPE 2016 talk “How to Torrent a Pharmaceutical” was circulated; it describes small-scale, automated chemical-reactor rigs that meter reagents at precise times to synthesize drugs on demand.  
• Chematica (chematica.net) was identified as the commercial retrosynthesis engine used in that talk, prompting a search for open-source or license-free alternatives.  
• ResearchGate’s reader-notification system was criticized for privacy leakage: it emails authors the real names and profile photos of every person who accesses a paper, even without opt-in.  
• A collaborative review on polymerase engineering is in draft; participants are debating whether to pursue formal journal submission or a faster arXiv preprint and are soliciting TODO items and co-authors.  
• Next Big Future coverage of self-assembling protein nanostructures was shared, leading to speculation about using binary DNA segments as nucleation centers for higher-order DNA assembly.  
• Binary DNA tracts were defined as segments composed of only two bases on each complementary strand, yielding four motif classes: R·Y (purines vs pyrimidines), K·M (G/T vs A/C), W (A/T), and S (G/C), with W and S being auto-complementary across strands.