• Joseph Vaughn Perling proposed repurposing Bitcoin miners as a real-time sink for excess power-plant capacity, letting surplus electricity be converted to Bitcoin and later traded for grid power; the group compared this to flywheels, vanadium-redox batteries, molten-salt towers, and AMTEC solid-state converters as alternative storage or trading mechanisms.

• A UK clinical trial reported by BBC News found that 3 % of first-episode psychosis patients have anti-NMDA-receptor auto-antibodies, suggesting a subset of psychoses may be autoimmune disorders treatable with immune therapy.

• Nature Nanotechnology published the first targeted intracellular recordings from dendritic spines using quantum-dot-coated nanopipettes (~15–30 nm tips), revealing 26 mV EPSPs in spines versus 0.5–1 mV at the soma and spine-neck resistances of ~420 MΩ, confirming strong electrical compartmentalization.

• A PNAS paper proposed replacing sulfate aerosols with 275-nm calcite (CaCO₃) particles for geoengineering: 2.1 Tg y⁻¹ could offset 1 W m⁻² of radiative forcing while repairing ozone and producing one-tenth the stratospheric heating of sulfates.

• Channel members criticized “citizen science” as venture-capital branding that offers token authorship instead of meaningful compensation (cash, reagents, data access), arguing that reagents and equipment—not data—are the real bottlenecks for amateur biology.

• A participant purchased a used DNA synthesizer and outlined plans to test its fluidics with argon and reagents, with discussion on avoiding pump damage and eventually dumping its firmware; links to EPROM-firmware-dumping tutorials were shared.

• 2015 iGEM projects reviewed included open-source prototypes such as siRNA-loaded exosomes for brain delivery, CRISPR/Cas9 cancer-cell suicide circuits, peptide-aptamer bacterial two-hybrid screening, cell-free protein matrices for gut nutrient sequestration, engineered neurotransmitter-producing probiotics, and a low-cost bacterial DNA-detection assay that circularizes a plasmid upon target binding.

• Participants debated the dominance of “E. coli makes chemical X” projects in iGEM and the poor track record of bacterial biofuels, proposing a curated list of high-impact project ideas to steer future teams toward more useful topics.

• The “Space Moss for Mars” 2015 iGEM project (UNIK Copenhagen) was highlighted for engineering moss as a life-support system on Mars, while TU Dresden’s entry described a modified PACE (phage-assisted continuous evolution) platform for directed evolution.

• Discussion envisioned an “OpenSmack” future of open-source synthetic membrane receptors and programmable ligands that could disrupt subscription-based pharmaceutical models.