- Teixobactin’s 2015 Nature paper (Ling et al.) was revisited to debunk popular “electronic chip” hype; the iChip device is actually a laser-cut microfluidic culture chamber made from inexpensive materials for isolating soil microbes.  
- A new arXiv preprint (1608.04062) introduced the “Stacked Approximated Regression Machine,” a lightweight deep-learning architecture proposed for resource-constrained deployments.  
- Participants critiqued Daniel J. Bernstein’s SafeCurves advocacy, arguing that Curve25519’s rigid design trades protocol flexibility and zero-knowledge compatibility for single-author trust, challenging the “no-committee” narrative.  
- Freshly transcribed talks from the Simons Institute on pairing-based and lattice-based cryptography, plus the SafeCurves 2014 talk transcript, were shared as reference material.  
- Four recent bioRxiv preprints were spotlighted: an improved mammalian-cell electroporation protocol, high-resolution RNA Polymerase II trigger-loop mutant mapping, local mRNA translation in astrocyte processes, and a feedback-loop model for 2.4-million-year hominid brain expansion without strong selection.  
- The “Paperfuge,” a 20-cent hand-powered centrifuge derived from a whirligig toy, was circulated as an ultra-low-cost field diagnostic tool.  
- A handheld 300 W laser demo led to discussion of scaling to 1 kW solid-state systems, revealing that inefficiencies and vacuum-filtration hardware can push electrical input to ~20 kW and require 2-inch cables.  
- A new bioRxiv preprint (doi:10.1101/053827) proposes a “boom–bust” model where lightning-induced brush fires periodically fragment and reconnect hominid populations, potentially selecting for cognitive flexibility over slow genetic adaptation.  
- The maxim “chemistry of brain fixation is far more scalable than chemistry of large-scale genome sequencing” was offered to emphasize the relative ease of preserving neural structure versus whole-genome sequencing.