• Elon Musk’s “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species” presentation was critiqued for depicting a Mars transfer vehicle with solar panels but no visible thermal radiators, raising questions about the realism of the proposed spacecraft design.  
• Leonard Guarente’s new longevity supplement “Basis” (nicotinamide riboside + pterostilbene) was dissected; participants argued that the combination lacks compelling evidence beyond the largely negative resveratrol/sirtuin data and that the same ingredients can be purchased generically for the same price.  
• fenn mapped the patent and supply-chain landscape for Basis: only ChromaDex manufactures nicotinamide riboside (Niagen) from cow milk, Basis itself is patented, yet generic supplement makers still sell the raw compounds.  
• __mz_o asked whether BioBricks can be bought online without the annual iGEM registry fee; kanzure replied that labs must usually be persuaded to share parts or perform PCR, as no commercial off-the-shelf marketplace exists.  
• The 2016 iGEM Giant Jamboree (starting 27 October) was noted as a key milestone for synthetic-biology teams.  
• kanzure circulated Y Combinator’s blog post and Hacker News thread on “Hard Tech Start-ups,” highlighting it as essential reading for deep-technology ventures in the transhumanist space.  
• A 2011 UC Berkeley “brain movies” study that reconstructs visual experience from fMRI data was linked; fenn observed it reconstructs externally viewed—not imagined—images, limiting its BCI relevance.  
• Participants speculated that the pseudonymous longevity writer “reason@fightaging.org” might be Guarente’s encryption-specialist son, though no definitive link was established.