- Ed Boyden’s lab is featured in Quanta Magazine for scalable, minimally invasive neural interfaces and expansion microscopy, highlighting a major advance in open, high-resolution brain mapping tools.  
- Sia-coin developers publicly warn against buying Bitmain’s new ASIC, explaining that an upcoming soft-fork could brick the hardware and illustrating the tension between ASIC resistance and user protection in decentralized networks.  
- Tadge Dryja’s “discreet log contracts” and Andrew Poelstra’s “scriptless scripts” are discussed as complementary Bitcoin techniques that enable privacy-preserving, oracle-based smart contracts without on-chain script data.  
- Open-source ultrasound imaging projects (Murgen/echOpen) are reviewed; participants conclude that sub-$100 probes are still out of reach and that DIY impedance-matched transducer arrays are the most viable path forward.  
- Focused ultrasound (sonoporation) is proposed as a micron-scale, reversible cell-membrane poration method for drug or gene delivery, with prior open-source electroporator designs (culture_shock) cited as reference hardware.  
- A literature review on MRI safety finds 1 °C local heating generally harmless but notes long-term, high-dose exposure data are lacking and that psychological effects during extended scans remain understudied.  
- Ultra-low-cost biopotential consumables are highlighted: bulk ECG/EKG electrodes are available on eBay for ~$0.05 each, dramatically lowering the barrier for DIY neuro/bio projects.  
- HBO/Netflix is filming several “shock-value” bio demos alongside a legitimate electroporation-validation experiment; concepts floated include glow-in-the-dark toes, peach-scented body-disposal fungi, and APOE-knockdown plasmids for dementia prevention.  
- Practical transfection ideas include gold-sputtered microneedle arrays for dermal electroporation, lipofection combined with low-voltage pulses to drive plasmids toward the nucleus, and ex-vivo blood electroporation of white cells followed by re-infusion.  
- Recent PNAS paper on closed-loop ultrasound plus microbubbles for targeted, reversible opening of the blood–brain/tumor barrier in rats is shared as a fundable “silly-but-serious” platform for CNS drug delivery.