• A Frontiers in Robotics & AI blog post sparked discussion on the counter-intuitive finding that humans rate slightly faulty robots as more likeable, with implications for how perceived imperfection lowers the threat profile of autonomous systems.

• Participants explored the technical feasibility of a low-energy (0.75 J/cm², 30 W) green-laser mosquito killer, noting that 10 mJ nanosecond Nd:YAG pulses can rupture mosquitoes without harming humans, raising questions about safe deployment in open environments.

• Sci-Hub’s sustainability was dissected: despite ~US $395 k in Bitcoin donations, no complete public mirror exists; bulk downloads are throttled, and the service relies on Cloudflare caching plus scattered university EZproxy credentials, highlighting a single-point-of-failure risk.

• Two complementary decentralization proposals were floated: (1) a crowdsourced scraping + Ethereum/Siacoin micropayment model with merkle-tree verification to distribute the 50 TB corpus, and (2) a “legacy” timelock-encryption scheme where Sci-Hub releases encrypted bundles now but supplies individual decryption keys on demand, guaranteeing eventual public release while preserving exclusivity.

• A new bioRxiv paper on DNA data storage (“Scaling up DNA data storage and random access retrieval”) reports achieving 10 TByte capacity in microfluidic “tape-library” wells, but read-out speed remains ~1 Mbit per week; the study validated its coding scheme against noisy Oxford Nanopore reads, yet omits synthesis chemistry details, prompting plans to query co-author Anselm Levskaya for transparency.

• Twist Bioscience’s role as oligo supplier and protocol advisor in the DNA-storage study was noted, alongside speculation that they may use electrochemical detritylation during synthesis, raising concerns about electrode longevity and reproducibility.

• Rob Carlson, author of “Biology Is Technology,” was identified as an affiliate of the UW Molecular Information Systems Lab behind the DNA-storage work, illustrating the convergence of synthetic-biology thought leadership and practical engineering efforts.