• Two new blockchain papers were shared: “Automated penalization of data breaches using crypto-augmented smart contracts” (eprint 2018/1050) and “Proof-of-Work sidechains” (eprint 2018/1048), both from the IACR eprint archive.

• Discussion of Plan S, the EU mandate requiring all publicly funded research to be open-access by 2020, including a critical blog post arguing the policy could disadvantage under-funded labs.

• A proposal that Sci-Hub has had more practical impact on open science than 15 years of advocacy, and that governments should retroactively abolish copyrights on publicly funded works or legally mandate public copies.

• Three recent genome-editing papers were circulated: (1) FASEB Journal study showing young plasma reduces age-related liver ischemia-reperfusion injury, (2) PNAS paper on stem-cell-derived clade-F AAV vectors enabling high-efficiency HDR-based editing, and (3) Communications Biology article describing covalent tethering of the repair template to Cas9 to boost HDR rates.

• Hackaday article on engineering yeast to secrete spider-silk proteins for scalable biomaterial production was highlighted as an example of low-cost synthetic biology.