- Lockheed Martin’s newly-published patent US20180047462A1 describes an aircraft-scale fusion-reactor design that uses magnetic-field encapsulation for plasma confinement and FLiBe or LiPb coolants, suggesting compact high-power energy sources for aviation.  
- BARseq, a method that combines in-situ DNA bar-coding with high-throughput sequencing, was used to map 1 309 auditory-cortex neurons to 11 targets, revealing 264 distinct projection patterns and offering a scalable bridge between anatomy and transcriptomics.  
- MIT’s “AlterEgo” silent-speech interface uses sub-vocal EMG sensing and bone-conduction feedback to let users issue commands without audible speech, pointing toward discreet, wearable BCIs.  
- A new plasmid-based CRISPR protocol achieves highly efficient gene editing in primary human T cells without viral vectors, lowering barriers to adoptive immunotherapy research.  
- A vice.com article by Giulio Prisco surveys Nectome’s “100 % fatal” whole-brain preservation chemistry and the broader debate on mind uploading versus cryonics.  
- Participants discussed scraping Addgene’s plasmid repository (≈ 70 000 constructs) to create an open, sequence-level database; legal clearance of third-party IP and AWS-signed URLs were identified as main obstacles.  
- Juul outlined strategies for avoiding CRISPR patent thickets in yeast engineering: leveraging expired foundational patents, third-party pre-issuance submissions to the USPTO, and transposase-based integration as an alternative to antibiotic selection.  
- A Cell Stem Cell paper (2018) provided fresh evidence that human hippocampal neurogenesis persists into old age, rekindling hopes for endogenous brain-repair therapies.  
- Open-source FPGA toolchains (Yosys, nextpnr, IceStorm, etc.) were catalogued at fabienm.eu/flf/open-source-fpga-map, highlighting community efforts to liberate hardware design from vendor lock-in.  
- Popper (github.com/systemslab/popper) was introduced as a workflow engine that can automatically generate reproducible papers from containerized computational experiments, aligning with calls to replace static PDFs with living documents.