• Discussion of speculative “encryption enzymes” for performing cryptographic operations inside living cells; skepticism voiced that modular addition and multiplication modulo large primes is biologically infeasible, with NAND-gate logic and DNA-as-memory suggested as possible work-arounds.

• Link to Vocativ article on scientists’ struggle to keep the human-genome data open and transparent, noted as unusually balanced journalism.

• Announcement of Nuclera, a new DNA-synthesis startup, along with a CB Insights overview of investors in the synthetic-biology space and links to the company’s Twitter feed.

• Rapid whole-brain imaging in freely behaving larval zebrafish (bioRxiv 131532) and a companion paper on whole-brain serial-section electron microscopy in the same model (bioRxiv 134882) highlighted as breakthrough neurotechnologies.

• Annual Reviews paper “A single-molecule view of genome editing proteins: Biophysical mechanisms of TALEs and CRISPR-Cas9” shared in full-text PDF, emphasizing single-molecule biophysics of programmable nucleases.

• Concern raised that the open-source “OpenChair” wheelchair project on Hackaday.io could attract FDA enforcement because powered wheelchairs are a regulated medical device class.

• Public release of a curated list of scientific-equipment CAD files (http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/cadfiles.txt) and a 2010 scrape of Thingiverse data (thingiverse_data.tar.gz) for building a decentralized, darknet repository of 3-D-printable lab hardware.

• Recommendation to use BRL-CAD for converting scientific CAD models to STL while acknowledging STL’s limitations.

• Link to a crashed facial-recognition advertisement in Oslo that exposed its real-time face-analysis code, illustrating privacy issues with commercial computer-vision deployments.