- A new Nature Medicine paper reports that CRISPR–Cas9 genome editing triggers a p53-mediated DNA-damage response, raising safety concerns for clinical applications.  
- Researchers published an open-source “eVOLVER” platform in Nature Biotechnology that gives precise, automated environmental control for high-throughput microbial growth experiments.  
- An arXiv preprint titled “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox” argues that realistic uncertainty distributions in Drake-equation parameters make it unsurprising that we observe no extraterrestrial intelligence, eliminating the need for speculative “Great Filter” explanations.  
- SynBioBeta article “Why the Future Will Be Written in DNA” was shared as a popular overview of DNA-based data storage and synthetic-biology advances.  
- Discussion of DNA data storage continued with a link to a Nextgov article describing U.S. intelligence-community interest in using DNA to archive exabyte-scale data.  
- Participants explored the idea of neural-network-driven reverse engineering: converting photographs of ad-hoc LEGO creations into CAD files, and extending the concept to automated brick sorting and inventory management.  
- A working neural-network LEGO sorting machine built by Jacques Mattheij was highlighted, along with links to his blog posts and YouTube video documenting the two-ton sorting project.  
- A 200-page Eurobricks forum thread containing ~6,000 official LEGO sets modeled in LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) was identified; participants planned to scrape and archive the files because many external links are already dead.  
- Links to two MIRI papers—”Functional Decision Theory” and “Logical Induction”—were dropped as relevant new work on formal instrumental rationality and reasoning under logical uncertainty.  
- A macOS code-signing vulnerability (Okta security blog) was noted, in which dual binaries can trick third-party security tools into validating one while the OS executes another.