- Discussion of the death of biohacker Aaron Traywick: kanzure revealed he had quietly hired Traywick’s team away months earlier; Josiah Zayner’s BBC quote about “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” was debated as a distraction from the need for evidence-based science.  
- kanzure’s group is finishing a polymerase paper drafted with the former Ascendance Biomedical staff and has a new collaboration with Cellectis/Wyss Institute to use TALENs for heart-cell reprogramming.  
- fltrz explored geochemical carbon cycling, asking whether mantle carbon isotopes are produced by radioactive decay and how carbonate dissolution shapes river cobblestones via curvature-dependent reaction rates.  
- nmz787 floated the idea of liability/PR insurance for parents of future “designer babies,” questioning whether GMO status would be treated as a pre-existing condition by health insurers.  
- DNA Script’s patent for an enzymatic DNA printer was dissected: claims describe reversible 3′-O-blocked nucleotides and biotin pull-down purification, yet the company publicly says it uses only natural nucleotides.  
- Links shared: BBC on Traywick (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43973588), Gizmodo on synthetic human genomes (https://gizmodo.com/artificial-genome-scientists-want-to-build-human-cells-1825693446), Cosmos on synthetic-biology revolution (https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/life-2-0-inside-the-synthetic-biology-revolution), and Cellectis/Wyss deal summary (http://www.bioworld.com/content/cellectis-inks-deal-wyss-church-puts-talens-heart-cell-recoding-effort-0).