- Drew Endy’s “10 k free genes” initiative is attempting to seed a biotechnology commons; an interview explains how Addgene’s default UBMTA licensing hampers redistribution and commercial use compared with the more permissive OpenMTA.

- Twist Bioscience and Ginkgo Bioworks signed a 1-billion-gene supply agreement to feed Ginkgo’s new organism-design foundry, illustrating the industrial scale at which DNA synthesis is now operating.

- A KU Leuven PhD thesis describes a hybrid nanopore platform that couples solid-state nanopores with surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) for real-time, label-free single-molecule DNA detection and potential sequencing, leveraging surface plasmon polaritons to create intense local fields inside the pore.

- Stanford’s Fiji ALD system can deposit ~0.5 Å/cycle platinum films, enabling sub-nanometer electrodes for nanofluidic electrophoresis devices at a throughput of ~50 nm/h, while participants note the lack of commercial MEMS services that combine both RIE and ALD for custom nanopore fabrication.

- George Church presented engineered MHC-I proteins that could make donor tissues universally transplantable, discussed at SBBSF17.

- A New York Times interactive piece predicts that permissive jurisdictions could become “the Amsterdam of gene editing,” offering unrestricted CRISPR edits to anyone with sufficient funds.

- Google Cloud’s new archival tier at $0.007/GB undercuts Amazon Glacier and sparks discussion of even cheaper storage options such as Wasabi ($0.0039/GB) and Backblaze B2 ($0.005/GB).

- Heath traced the evolution of “open money” from the 2008 financial crisis through the Metacurrency Project to the current Holochain architecture, emphasizing community-issued currencies and distributed wealth models.

- Walmart’s internal data centers reportedly process ~40 PB/day of customer-transaction data, highlighting the scale of commercial data infrastructure.

- Two $650 hardware items—a Vaisala GMP252 NDIR CO₂ probe and a surplus 12-bit QImaging scientific camera—illustrate the current price landscape for lab-grade sensors and imaging equipment.