- The upcoming “Connectomics” course (22–26 April 2017, Siena, Italy) was highlighted as a possible source of new techniques; participants debated whether its €830 fee and lack of promised recordings justified attendance or sponsorship.  
- A new pre-print (Zador et al., 2017) on “Using high-throughput barcode sequencing to efficiently map connectomes” was circulated; the method proposes replacing optical imaging with DNA bar-coding and sequencing to accelerate connectome reconstruction.  
- Discussion linked the barcode approach to FISSEQ and aptamer multiplexing for simultaneously reading out synaptic strength and receptor distributions in fixed tissue.  
- Transcripts from the 2013 Global Futures 2045 conference were re-shared, containing talks by Berger (hippocampal prostheses), Church (synthetic biology), Boyden (optogenetics), Koene (substrate-independent minds), and Hayworth (brain preservation).  
- Participants expressed skepticism that the Human Brain Project or similar large initiatives would openly share data, noting a perceived culture of secrecy around EM reconstruction advances.  
- A brief side-thread covered 3Scan’s high-throughput microscopy platform, with the suggestion that scattered technical details exist in earlier logs and via personal contacts.  
- The U.S. federal climate-science office’s first formal recommendation to fund geoengineering research was noted, with references to a $9 B marine-cloud-whitening fleet proposal as the “least invasive” fast cooling option.  
- A proposal for a “SEARCH” network (Sharing Experimental Animal Resources, Coordinating Holdings) was circulated to reduce waste by redistributing leftover animal-tissue samples among labs.  
- A speculative idea was floated to combine homologous-recombination-driven viral evolution with phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE) for rapid generation of novel viral capabilities.