- Modafinil and Adderall self-experiments: users report 400–600 Elo-point gains on chess.com under Adderall, use immediate post-dose chess sessions as a “training ritual,” and note modafinil’s smoother comedown compared with Adderall’s dysphoric rebound.  
- Longitudinal cognitive testing protocols: participants are combining Quantified-Mind and Cambridge Brain Sciences to track nootropic effects and invite others to request detailed protocols.  
- CRISPR resources shared: a biorxiv preprint (169441) on rapid gene-characterization in E. coli cell-free TX-TL systems and a review on CRISPR/Cas9 engineering of Toxoplasma and Plasmodium parasites.  
- Neuromorphic computing advances: Nature paper on nanoscale spintronic oscillators that act as ultra-low-power spiking neurons, plus a biorxiv preprint (166819) modeling synaptic normalization and heterosynaptic plasticity through competition for finite synaptic building blocks.  
- Bio-art and de-extinction discussion: feasibility of creating primate-style blue skin in pigs via collagen-array genes, chromatophore transplantation from cephalopods/fish, George Church’s plan to release 80,000 engineered woolly mammoths for Arctic re-grassing, and skepticism toward Hwang Woo-suk’s Korean lab.  
- Gene-drive ethics: Gates-funded anti-malaria mosquito trials raise concerns about villagers being trapped inside domes with released insects; dark-humor thread imagines replacing 40–60 % of Earth’s biomass with synthetic organisms.  
- Machine-learning links: blog post and arXiv paper (1609.09106) on “HyperNetworks,” where one neural network generates the weights of another, plus Bitcoin scaling politics referencing an anonymous researcher “Voldemort” and Confidential Transactions.