• MIT hosted a “Festival of Fake Science,” featuring tongue-in-cheek theories such as dinosaur extinction caused by a temporary reversal of Earth’s gravity, highlighting the boundary between satire and scientific communication.  
• A new pre-print, “A practical guide to CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in Lepidoptera,” was shared on bioRxiv, offering open protocols for gene editing in butterflies and moths.  
• The Human Genome Project-Write (HGP-write) accepted yashgaroth’s proposal as an official pilot project, providing both funding and promotional support for large-scale synthetic-genome work.  
• Participants debated the strategic risks of patent trolling versus open science, noting that prior-publication evidence and withheld “key ingredients” (e.g., proprietary reagents) can still protect community projects under current first-to-file rules.  
• MPEGLA’s patent-pool model was dissected: some argued it enables consumer MPEG devices by mediating corporate disputes, while others view it as a primary driver of codec-related lawsuits that necessitate open alternatives like Ogg Vorbis.  
• A call went out for a dedicated project manager to coordinate open-source bioengineering efforts, specifically to create timelines and milestones for a low-cost microfluidic DNA synthesizer proof-of-concept.  
• Recent neuroscience literature was circulated, including high-throughput barcode-sequencing methods for connectome mapping, systematic naming schemes for Drosophila neurons, and cerebral-organoid studies of interneuron migration.  
• Additional links covered magnetoreception genes in rainbow trout, photoacoustic tomography imaging, Zuckerberg/Chan funding for bioRxiv, and a Scientific American podcast on the long-term domestication of foxes through selective breeding.