- A new arXiv preprint (1610.08425) challenges the popular claim that photosynthetic energy transfer depends on long-lived electronic quantum coherence, arguing that earlier evidence for quantum effects in biology is overstated.

- Participants circulated a detailed critique of cryonics, asserting that the field operates on “faith-based” rather than science-based practices, lacks rigorous feedback loops, and misrepresents ultrastructural preservation; they proposed an alternative model of IRB-supervised clinical trials with iterative pre-clinical validation and an explicit obligation to attempt patient recovery without invoking speculative future nanotechnology.

- The group discussed practical paths to low-cost DNA synthesis, warning against purchasing $50k–$200k inkjet oligo synthesizers before fully characterizing chemistry variables such as humidity, side-reactions, and bead compatibility, and suggested a 5–10-year directed-evolution program to create microbial strains capable of correctly assembling thousands of DNA fragments.

- Amazon’s new cloud stack—Rekognition deep-learning vision API, EC2 F1 instances with user-programmable FPGAs, and the 100 PB/week Snowmobile data-transfer truck—was highlighted as a turnkey platform for large-scale, low-latency “weird computation,” while a Google engineer’s Hacker News post argued that genomic-data “storage crises” are exaggerated and described moving petabyte-scale pipelines to MapReduce/BigQuery, leading to Google Cloud Genomics.

- Shared research links included four pre-prints on advanced genome engineering (model-guided multiplex editing, recombinase-based genetic logic circuits, the Millstone microbial-genome design platform, and directed evolution of magnetically-responsive proteins), plus neurotechnology advances such as scalable automated neuron segmentation from multispectral images, neuromorphic silicon photonics, graphene micro-transistor brain mapping arrays, probabilistic synapse detection at ≈1 B synapses/mm³ in human cortex, and hierarchical deep networks that decode dream content.