- New Gaia parallax data for the “alien-megastructure” star KIC 8462852 (2.554887 mas) begins to constrain distance and therefore some proposed explanations for its brightness dips, although error bars remain large.  
- Discussion of Bitcoin privacy techniques: TumbleBit (off-chain anonymous payment hub) is compared with JoinMarket (deployed CoinJoin market); links provided to both papers plus supporting studies on Confidential Transactions, Mimblewimble, Ring-CT, and one-way aggregate signatures.  
- Hardware progress noted: a hackerspace reports advances on refurbishing its scanning-electron microscope.  
- Neuroscience links shared on high-resolution fMRI showing that car experts develop holistic representations in the fusiform face area (FFA) and that cortical thickness there correlates with face/object recognition performance; additional papers tie refractive errors to reduced vividness and colour in mental imagery.  
- Mozilla’s WebReplay deterministic record-and-replay debugging tool for web content is highlighted.  
- Kickstarter campaign for the first desktop water-jet cutter is circulated.  
- TI LMV1090 far-field microphone-array chip datasheet is passed around for audio-capture projects.  
- CAD workflow question: alternatives to FreeCAD for STEP-file assembly (BRL-CAD, SolidWorks, Inventor) are debated, with consensus that Windows VMs are currently required for most professional packages.