- Ed Boyden gave a new interview covering his latest work in synthetic neurobiology; the video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFf1nblR3Zc.  
- The Synthetic Neurobiology group released a paper describing an automated in-vivo patch-clamp system that benchmarks how well extracellular multielectrode arrays can record neural spikes: http://syntheticneurobiology.org/PDFs/18.08.allen.pdf.  
- All recent publications from Boyden’s lab have been collected at http://syntheticneurobiology.org/publications.  
- The channel discussed attending SynBioBeta 2018 in San Francisco (Oct 1–3); the event calendar PDF is https://2018.synbiobeta.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/SynBioBeta_Events_Calendar_Website_PDF-d3.pdf.  
- A new “blind off-chain lightweight transaction” protocol called libbolt was shared; it is based on the Green et al. CCS 2017 paper “Bolt: Anonymous Payment Channels for Decentralized Currencies” (https://acmccs.github.io/papers/p473-greenA.pdf) and the code is at https://github.com/yeletech/libbolt.  
- The NYC Lightning Network Developer Residency (Oct 22–26) was announced as another event of interest: http://lightningresidency.com/.  
- There was surprise and discussion about Bill Kekich (longevity researcher) apparently joining the gene-therapy company BioViva.  
- A brief side discussion weighed the pros/cons of registering for an ORCID researcher identifier.