- Discussion of whether FOIA requests for NIH/NSF grant proposals constitute public disclosure that could invalidate later patents; Ed Boyden asserted that “everything you write in an NIH, NSF, etc. grant is public information,” prompting debate over redaction practices and reviewer confidentiality.  
- Shared links to two new Cell papers and their open-source hardware: “Robotic automation of in vivo two-photon targeted whole-cell patch-clamp electrophysiology” and “Closed-loop real-time imaging enables fully automated cell-targeted patch-clamp neural recording in vivo,” plus project site http://autopatcher.org/ with downloadable MATLAB and LabVIEW source code.  
- Mention of commercial gear from Neuromatic Devices and the broader push to automate patch-clamp recording for scalable neuroscience data collection.  
- Brief exchange on the US Marshals Service Bitcoin auction of seized Silk-Road assets as a precedent for how government liquidation might handle future bio-seized IP, with a side reference to a recent paper on yeast-based psilocybin production (DOI 10.1002/anie.201705489).  
- Conversation starter on Yuval Noah Harari’s “Homo Deus,” China’s ideological vacuum as fertile ground for transhumanist memes, and a resulting reading-list cascade that included Stapledon’s “Last and First Men,” Lem, Wolfe, Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, and Zindell.