- A new NIH-funded effort led by Peng Yin will use DNA-nanotech barcoding and signal amplification to build a high-resolution Human BioMolecular Atlas, mapping individual cells and their functions across the body.  
- The open-source DeepSequence model (GitHub: debbiemarkslab/DeepSequence) uses deep generative networks to predict the phenotypic impact of genetic mutations directly from sequence data.  
- A pre-print from the Deisseroth lab presents a scalable pipeline for obtaining mesoscale connectomes from single mice, promising routine, individual-level brain-circuit mapping.  
- Karl Deisseroth and Yoon Seok Kim released two Nature papers detailing high-resolution crystal structures that reveal how channelrhodopsins achieve ion-selectivity, fast kinetics and color tuning—critical knowledge for next-gen optogenetics.  
- Addgene has just released new plasmids enabling temporally precise, single-cell-resolution optogenetic control, expanding the toolkit for neuroscience and synthetic-biology experiments.  
- Discussion of a large Lancet meta-analysis concluded that vitamin-D supplementation does not reduce fracture risk or improve bone-mineral density in the general population, prompting debate over how narrow outcome measures shape public-health guidance.  
- Participants highlighted that vitamin-D research often ignores co-factors: vitamin A modulates both toxicity and efficacy, while vitamins A and D together up-regulate the K1→MK4 conversion needed for proper calcium management.  
- Anders Sandberg’s “aestivation hypothesis” paper (arXiv:1705.03394) was circulated—the argument that an advanced civilization might wait trillions of years to harvest vastly more energy was framed as the ultimate cosmic marshmallow test.  
- Links to a Bulletproofs implementation in pure Rust (dalek-cryptography/bulletproofs) and a reinforcement-learning system that learns physical skills from monocular video (SFV project) were shared as examples of rapidly advancing open-source crypto and AI tooling.