- A user sought advice on building a low-cost “mini-supercomputer” for Mother’s Day, linking a bulk eBay lot of ten HP DL360e Gen8 servers (dual E5-2430L v2 CPUs, P420 RAID cards, no RAM/HDD) as a starting point.  
- Discussion of DIY plant engineering: one participant asked whether a complete novice could realistically perform Agrobacterium-mediated transformation and what technical limitations constrain the method.  
- Links to recent aging research were shared, including a PNAS paper on transposon up-regulation in aging termite workers versus reproductive castes, framed as support for the “transposon storm” model of aging.  
- Neuroscience–AI intersection: a tweet and YouTube talk on “Deep Learning with Ensembles of Neocortical Microcircuits” from ICLR 2018 were highlighted as an inspiring example of cross-disciplinary work.  
- Security hardware roundup: multiple open-source or alternative hardware tokens to YubiKey were posted (NitroKey, U2F Zero) along with ImperialViolet blog posts and Google’s Advanced Protection Program guides.  
- Bioethics references: articles on Harvard’s embedded bioethicist overseeing George Church’s lab and a PMC paper on “Human germ line editing—roles and responsibilities” were circulated.  
- A quick-and-dirty vacuum-chamber idea was proposed: embedding nichrome wire in solder so a timer circuit can melt the seal and open the chamber without mechanical fasteners.