• A global shortage of clinical-grade viral vectors is bottlenecking gene-therapy trials; the NYT reports that manufacturing custom AAV or lentivirus can consume ≥⅓ of a biotech’s development budget, prompting firms like BioMarin and Bluebird Bio to build dedicated, single-company plants rather than rely on third-party CMOs.

• Indee Labs (YC-backed) is developing microfluidic devices aimed at scalable, non-viral gene delivery—an alternative approach to the viral-vector supply crunch.

• Recent computational-neuroscience papers shared include a mean-field model of adaptive exponential integrate-and-fire networks for mesoscopic cortical dynamics, studies on resonance/anti-resonance in 3-D neuronal systems, and stimulus-induced transitions between spike-wave discharges and sleep spindles via thalamic reticular nucleus modulation.

• “Dynamic Routing Between Capsules” (Sabour et al., arXiv 1710.09829) was highlighted as a new neural-network architecture that may improve hierarchical feature learning.

• Discussion on objective biomarkers for “willpower” questioned the popular blood-glucose depletion hypothesis, noting the absence of quantitative diagnostics comparable to blood-sugar or cholesterol tests.

• A Forbes piece was circulated showing Bluebird Bio’s purchase of a manufacturing facility to secure its own viral-vector supply, reinforcing industry-wide anxiety about production capacity.

• Open questions were raised about why dental xenotransplantation (e.g., pig or synthetic tooth buds) is not practiced, and whether injectable tooth organoids could ever be cost-competitive with traditional implants.

• Coverage of the 7th RISC-V Workshop (lowRISC blog) summarized progress on open-source silicon, emphasizing its relevance to secure, customizable neurotech and bio-device controllers.

• “Deep Image Prior” (Ulyanov et al.) was presented as evidence that the structure of an untrained convolutional generator already encodes powerful image statistics, enabling restoration tasks without any external dataset.

• Recent stem-cell/germline engineering literature shared includes in-vitro expansion of mouse primordial germ-cell-like cells that recapitulate an epigenetic “blank slate,” reviews on deriving gametes from alternative stem-cell sources, and a primer on gonadal somatic-cell reprogramming.