- SENS Research Foundation shared two new project pages: “Engineering a new thymus” and “Death-resistant cells,” plus an Eventbrite link for a ScienceVest funding series on reversing aging.  
- A Stanford/UC Berkeley collaboration (AHA) is building a fully open-source FPGA toolchain from HDL through place-and-route; two Python-based HDL alternatives—Cornell’s PyMTL and UCSB’s PyRTL—were highlighted.  
- Intel will add deep-learning instructions to future processors; papers on compressed-DNN inference (“EIE”) and 1-bit “Binarized Neural Networks” were circulated for low-power AI acceleration.  
- A browser-side GPU BLAS library called WeBLAS was noted, using WebGL pixel shaders for matrix math; the dormant WebCL standard for browser-based OpenCL was also referenced.  
- Recent ML literature shared includes: variational autoencoders (Kingma & Welling), boosting-as-gradient-descent, continuous molecular auto-design, and a visual “Neural Network Zoo” taxonomy.  
- The White House released its 2016 report “Preparing for the Future of AI,” linked for community review.  
- Discussion of the first wiki (c2.com) going offline prompted an Internet Archive backup link and incredulity over the lack of redundancy.