- A newly published reverse-engineering study (https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/article-2803.pdf) reveals that a widely deployed commercial neurostimulator transmits data over the air with neither encryption nor authentication, making implanted devices trivially exploitable for torture or seizure induction.  
- Discussion framed the problem as systemic: low-power brain implants rely on wireless power coupling, leaving little energy for cryptography, and medical-device vendors historically ignore security unless forced by regulation or insurance incentives.  
- Participants proposed leveraging insurance markets to drive adoption of security: companies that refuse to implement encryption would pay higher premiums, shifting the cost-benefit calculation toward “doing the right thing.”  
- Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were cited as examples where baking encryption into the standard (even imperfect) raised the baseline security of consumer products, suggesting a similar path for future neurotech protocols.  
- Y Combinator announced it will provide shared wet-lab space for its bio startups (https://blog.ycombinator.com/lab-space-for-yc-bio-companies/), lowering capital barriers for early-stage synthetic-biology and health-tracking ventures.  
- A Caltech lab posted open protocols for improving protein expression and assay reproducibility (http://clemonslab.caltech.edu/improve.html), aimed at DIY and academic researchers.  
- Critical security tool released: “GPG Reaper” (https://github.com/kacperszurek/gpg_reaper) demonstrates how to extract/stole private GPG keys from gpg-agent cache, underscoring the need for hardened key management.  
- IOTA’s “coordinator”-based consensus and homemade trinary cryptography were dissected as cautionary tales of unnecessary complexity and flawed design (https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-iota-9a6a9ddc4367).  
- NASA’s TESS exoplanet-hunting satellite launched successfully, expected to catalog >20,000 new worlds and provide open data streams for planet-detection algorithms.