- A Frontiers research topic on “Augmentation of Brain Function: Facts, Fiction, and Controversy” was circulated, gathering papers on emerging neuro-enhancement technologies and their societal implications.  
- Chromologic’s “artificial reticulocytes” project—synthetic red-blood-cell mimics for drug delivery—was highlighted in a newly released Army SBIR report.  
- Parabiosis research presented at ISSCR 2017 showed that blood exchange between exercised and sedentary mice transfers exercise benefits, spurring discussion on soluble “exercise factors” and anti-aging applications.  
- Elon Musk’s open-access article “Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species” was shared, detailing SpaceX’s Mars architecture, timelines, and engineering challenges for sustainable off-world colonization.  
- Molecular Assemblies announced progress on enzymatic DNA synthesis, a potential alternative to phosphoramidite chemistry that could enable longer, higher-fidelity DNA constructs for synthetic-biology workflows.  
- A European Council call for immediate, full open-access to all scientific papers by 2020 was noted, alongside ongoing efforts to eliminate paywalls and accelerate reproducibility.  
- MIT’s high-dimensional stochastic-gradient-descent framework for neural-network optimization was circulated, illustrating how brain-inspired algorithms can improve sample efficiency in machine-learning tasks.  
- A robotic navigation system capable of autonomously targeting sub-cortical neurons for in-vivo intracellular electrophysiology was introduced, promising more precise and less invasive brain-machine interfaces.  
- DREADDs (Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs) were declared fully open-source with no MTA required, lowering barriers for optogenetics-style chemogenetic experiments.