• AAV9-mediated TRF1 gene therapy in 1- and 2-year-old mice significantly delayed age-related neuromuscular decline, glucose intolerance, cognitive loss, subcutaneous-fat wasting, and chronic anemia, suggesting that telomere-shelterin restoration can extend health-span (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acel.12677/full).

• A DNA-based non-deterministic universal Turing machine (NUTM) was proposed that exploits massive parallelism and strand displacement to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time; participants questioned the mathematical definition of “non-deterministic” in this context (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5378132/).

• A CRISPR-Cas9/RNA-polymerase hybrid circuit was discussed in which a biosensor triggers T7 RNAP to transcribe guide RNAs on demand, enabling transient, switchable gene edits without continuous gRNA expression; latency is limited by gRNA degradation kinetics (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acschembio.7b00532).

• Multiple molecular recording papers were shared: a microbial-rhodopsin “flash memory” that photochemically imprints neuronal action potentials, a calcium-sensitive photocage that releases fluorophores only when both light and high [Ca²⁺] are present, and statistical frameworks for aligning nucleotide-level timestamps in DNA-based activity logs (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja411338t, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ange.201602941/full, http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005483).

• Deep-sequencing assays quantified how divalent cations modulate DNA-polymerase fidelity landscapes, while structural bioinformatics plus Sso7d fusion increased Y-family polymerase processivity up to 10-fold and improved lesion bypass opposite 8-oxoG (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0043876, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5500549/).

• A volumetric 3-D digital-light photoactivatable dye display was highlighted for real-time volumetric visualization, and a 2017 review on genetically encoded voltage indicators was circulated as essential reading for scalable neurophotonics (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5508202/, http://cohenweb.rc.fas.harvard.edu/Publications/Xu_Zou_Cohen_Voltage_Imaging_COCB.pdf).

• Participants noted the EFF critique that overly broad patents are stifling AI/ML innovation, and briefly referenced Anthony Levandowski’s AI-based “Way of the Future” church aiming to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15378121, https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levandowski-is-his-messenger/).