• Thermal-imaging side-channel attack: Bruce Schneier blogged about recovering recently-typed passwords from residual heat on keyboards, highlighting a new physical-layer security concern.  
• DNA as archival storage: Bryan Johnson (OS Fund) promoted Catalog DNA’s work on encoding data in DNA, while Singularity Hub covered a new enzymatic DNA-synthesis method that could assemble an entire human genome in a single day.  
• Debunking the “90 % of all data created in the last two years” meme: participants traced the claim to a 2013 SINTEF blog post and argued it conflates social-media metrics with all digital data, noting that digital photography and sequencing outputs have existed for decades.  
• Gigantism genetics: kanzure linked the Lin28a overgrowth paper (PMC3069638) and the classic 1982 Nature paper on metallothionein–growth-hormone transgenic “super-mice,” clarifying that metallothionein is used as an inducible promoter, not a hormone itself.  
• IQ and education controversy: fenn shared a PsyArXiv preprint asserting that each additional year of schooling raises IQ by 1–5 points; jrayhawk dismissed it as likely “extreme observational fuckery.”  
• OpenSCAD tooling: archels posted tutorials on the “attach” and “bevel” libraries to streamline mechanical CAD workflows; streety noted prior ignorance of such libraries and welcomed the productivity boost.  
• End-specific primer binding: nmz787 and yashgaroth brainstormed ways to engineer primers or enzymes (e.g., bulky 5′ adducts, engineered UvsX) that would anneal only to DNA fragment ends, not internal sequences, for cleaner PCR or assembly reactions.