- A new transcript series from BioHack the Planet 2018 was posted, covering “the future of biotech,” “day two,” and a talk by Tristan Roberts & Patti Zettler on regulatory issues; all are available at http://diyhpl.us/diyhpluswiki/transcripts/biohacktheplanet/2018/.

- Luis Creze (Microsoft) outlined a path to billion-droplet-per-second electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) lab-on-chip systems: tiled electrode arrays, capillary bridges between boards, and massively parallel droplet routing.

- kanzure shared the paper “Procreative Beneficence and Genetic Enhancement,” inviting discussion on the ethics of selecting embryos for higher expected welfare and cognitive ability.

- fltrz proposed a citizen-science “passive solar LIDAR” concept: record audio-rate fluctuations in solar irradiance with pyranometers, then correlate the signal with the photocurrent from unused nighttime PV parks to detect sunlight reflections off small near-Earth objects; depth resolution would be ~1.5 km at 192 kHz sampling.

- fltrz further suggested that the aggregate area of all photovoltaic panels exceeds that of any optical telescope, so the array could serve as an enormous photodiode for both asteroid early-warning and autonomous interplanetary navigation by timing correlations with known planetary orbits.

- maaku pointed to NASA work on X-ray pulsar navigation as a complementary deep-space autonomous positioning method, linking the Mitchell et al. paper on using millisecond-pulsar timing for spacecraft navigation.