- A startup called Carverr is offering to store Bitcoin private keys in synthetic DNA; participants in the channel questioned the security model, noting that DNA is trivially replicable.  
- The 2018 Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) will be held 10–13 October in Shenzhen; travel fellowships are available via the Open Bioinformatics Foundation.  
- Participants lamented the lack of systematic human brain autopsies, estimating only a few million have ever been performed, and proposed a new “donate your body to science” protocol that includes end-of-life hospice care plus exhaustive pre- and post-mortem medical work-ups.  
- A 1990 paper on cryptographically time-stamping digital documents was shared as foundational reading: “How to time-stamp a digital document” (Springer).  
- Discussion of open-source tools for reverse-engineering magnetic media: Chris_99’s project visualizes mag-stripe data using a magneto-optic garnet film and polarized light (GitHub: anfractuosity/magstripe).  
- France was cited as an example where donating one’s body to science actually incurs a fee, surprising other participants.  
- A request for Python libraries to convert raw analog oscilloscope traces into digital logic-analyzer output led to a brief evaluation of sigrok.org and a fallback plan to implement simple threshold-based edge detection.