• The channel debated the implications of the PLOS paper “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?” and its Neuron rebuttal, concluding that reverse-engineering CPUs and brains demand fundamentally different toolkits and that current neuroscience methods may be insufficient for understanding complex engineered systems.

• CAMERA 1 and CAMERA 2, described in Science 360:eaap8992, were highlighted as bacterial and mammalian “analog tape recorders” that encode stimuli into plasmid ratios or permanent single-base edits, enabling multi-generational event logging with simple sequencing readout.

• Rolling-circle translation of circular RNAs (PNAS 111:14542, Sci. Rep. 5:16435) was discussed as a potential route to in-vivo molecular assemblers, showing that endless mRNA loops can produce long repetitive proteins or be programmed for controlled termination.

• Sub-micron silicon implants were explored, including a 2010 review on “Intracellular silicon chips in living cells,” the concept of 14-nm CMOS microcontrollers the size of red-blood cells, and powering them with on-board glucose or RF scavenging bio-batteries.

• A $9.5 M DARPA program pairing Ginkgo Bioworks and Transcriptic to integrate AI-driven lab automation was noted as evidence that cloud bio-foundries are moving from fringe to federal-scale.

• The Goldman Sachs slide “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” sparked a transhumanist re-frame: sell health upgrades to create more productive customers and larger future markets, an economic model still lacking a formal write-up.

• Open-source retrosynthesis tools like RetSynth (Sandia, GitHub-hosted) were shared, alongside criticism that recent Nature/Cell ML-synthesis papers withhold code and data, highlighting broader reproducibility concerns and the bottleneck of proprietary literature databases.

• Speculative DNA-data-storage schemes were outlined, including using wild-type phi29 DNA polymerase in successive rolling-circle amplification steps to build desired sequences, with proposed enzyme-level control experiments involving electric-field pulses or polarized light to influence base selection.

• Hardware integration brainstorms included decapping commercial ICs, mating exposed dies to micro/nanofluidics, and depositing polymerase on junctions to read/write DNA directly on-chip.

• Skepticism about DNA storage hype was voiced, with participants noting that faster, smaller, and more easily rewritable molecular memories may supersede DNA, which is currently hard to edit and largely a “fad.”