- EPFL researchers unveiled an “acoustic prism” that splits sound by frequency without any moving parts, pointing toward compact, passive acoustic signal processing devices.  
- A biorxiv preprint describes nanopore-based “rapid gut resistome mapping,” demonstrating same-day identification of antibiotic-resistance genes directly from human stool samples.  
- Another biorxiv paper introduces programmable cytidine deaminases that achieve targeted C→T DNA edits without double-strand breaks, showing 13 % efficiency in E. coli and 2.5 % in human cells with minimal off-target effects.  
- The channel discussed the impending launch of ChemRxiv, a chemistry-dedicated preprint server modeled on arXiv, alongside the broader need for a unified search engine that spans arXiv, bioRxiv, ChemRxiv, and engrXiv.  
- A shared Google Drive folder (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9mKLQDGLPxsRHRiUHdIa1pxaEk) contains high-speed-camera footage and audio files from a “visual microphone” experiment that recovers sound from vibrations captured in ordinary video of tin-foil and plant leaves.  
- Members debated the legal status of importing aniracetam and other racetams into Germany and Austria as a workaround to Czech customs seizures.  
- A news item about a paralyzed patient regaining the ability to walk after epidural stimulation was circulated as evidence of accelerating neuro-rehabilitation breakthroughs.  
- Baidu Research open-sourced “Warp-CTC” (https://github.com/baidu-research/warp-ctc), a fast, parallel implementation of the Connectionist Temporal Classification loss for training sequence models such as speech and handwriting recognition systems.  
- The concept of “DDoSCoin”—a cryptocurrency whose proof-of-work is performing distributed denial-of-service attacks—was highlighted on Hacker News and condemned in-channel as potentially worse than assassination markets.  
- References were made to fringe-science archives: the long-running journal “Speculations in Science and Technology,” a quantum-mechanical theory of superconductivity without resistance, and the 1992 “paraterraforming” (worldhouse) concept for enclosing planetary surfaces with pressurized membranes.