- Craig Venter’s 2017 “digital-to-biological converter” (Nature Biotechnology) uses microfluidics to print DNA and proteins on demand; participants questioned its scalability for very long constructs, which still need ~10⁹ error-correcting cycles.  
- A Hacker News comment highlighted that textbook DNA-replication animations are misleading: the cytosol is a crowded, high-collision environment where correct interactions occur by chance among millions of collisions per second.  
- kanzure proposed evolving “less-randomly-organized” cells by fluorophore-tagging enzymes and using FACS or microscopy to select lines that anchor enzymes to cytoskeleton or membranes, replacing diffusive chaos with motor-protein logistics.  
- Discussion of the GP-Write synthetic human-genome project referenced a 2016 draft timeline (linked PDF) and asked what new technical content an October 2017 white-paper could add.  
- Shared GWAS findings included loci for stretch-marks (ELN), cognitive function (COGENT consortium), allergy susceptibility, dysmenorrhea pain severity (NGF locus), and low resting heart rate.  
- Rigetti Computing announced “Forest,” an end-to-end quantum-computing stack with in-house fabrication and a cloud-accessible emulator (Medium post linked).  
- nmz787_i began learning SystemVerilog OVM/RTL verification for hardware design and planned same-day wet-lab tests of a home-built electroporator on fresh E. coli cultures.