• Cave-dwelling Mexican tetra fish have independently evolved an ~80 % reduction in sleep via up-regulation of the neuropeptide Hypocretin/Orexin (HCRT); pharmacological HCRT inhibition restores normal sleep only in cavefish, suggesting a conserved arousal pathway that could be pharmacologically exploited for human sleep-reduction.

• Participants sketched a <$9 k general-purpose cooking robot concept that would adapt OpenTrons-style XYZ gantries, use motion-capture recordings of human chefs, and repurpose Transcriptic/Autoprotocol lab-automation languages as a recipe-scripting standard.

• Electrowetting-based digital microfluidics was dissected: droplets are steered across electrode arrays by electric fields across a dielectric layer, and the latest OpenDrop designs employ inter-digitated “teeth” electrodes for finer droplet control; review papers and demo videos were circulated.

• A $3 k open-hardware rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) device covered by Hackaday prompted discussion on DIY brain-stimulation gear, with a link to NeuroPlusTech’s preorder page.

• FlyPi, a fully 3-D-printable open-source fluorescence microscope and optogenetics platform, was announced on biorxiv and promoted via @biorxiv_neursci.

• Diffusion-MRI “local connectome fingerprinting” can predict social, biological, and cognitive attributes from individual brain wiring patterns, according to a new biorxiv pre-print.

• Cornell’s electron microscope pixel array detector (EMPAD) captures images in <1 ms, spans 1–1,000,000 electrons per pixel per frame, and enables simultaneous mapping of local strain, electric, and magnetic fields with unprecedented dynamic range.

• Multiplex genome editing has been demonstrated in the ultra-fast-growing bacterium Vibrio natriegens, positioning it as a new chassis for rapid synthetic-biology prototyping.

• A Science Advances paper documents dinoflagellate cells that fire ballistic nematocyst projectiles—single-cell weaponized organelles—complete with SEM movies highlighting extreme cellular complexity.

• A PLOS Computational Biology paper reveals that conventional medical comas are still manually titrated by clinicians watching EEG readouts and adjusting propofol infusion rates in real time.