- A Nature paper reports the first self-organization of a human “organizer” in vitro: researchers confined human embryonic stem cells to 22 mm squares, added Wnt and Nodal signals, and produced embryo-like structures that express organizer-specific genes—work that technically bypasses the 14-day rule by using synthetic embryoids rather than natural embryos.  
- NASA’s updated “Torpor Habitat for Human Stasis” NIAC document was circulated, outlining progress on metabolic suppression techniques for long-duration spaceflight.  
- Discussion of PCR history and patent thickets: participants noted that water-bath PCR was already routine by the late 1980s, and a linked Springer chapter details ongoing IP obstacles.  
- IEEE Xplore’s recent migration to AWS prompted speculation about whether residual data fragments could be recovered from decommissioned cloud instances—viewed as increasingly unlikely due to modern drive-scrubbing practices.  
- Gencove announced it is “sunsetting” its direct-to-consumer genomics portal, shifting focus away from individual sequencing services.  
- The Google SRE book (Site Reliability Engineering) was shared as recommended reading for building robust bioinformatics and lab-automation infrastructure.  
- Nagini, a static verifier for Python 3 built on the Viper infrastructure, was introduced as a potential tool for formally verifying lab-automation or analysis scripts.  
- CCN 2018 (Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, Philadelphia, 5–8 Sept) was highlighted for those working on brain–computer interfaces and computational models of cognition.