- **Gene-editing ethics debate**: Participants questioned the “opt-in rich jock consent” narrative around germline editing, arguing that outlawing self-experimentation does not stop it and may simply push it underground.

- **Early neural specialization hypothesis**: One contributor speculated that if binocular vision circuits differentiate early in development, they bias the kinds of higher-level signal processing (dot-product-like computations) that later cortical areas can perform.

- **Cerebellum caution**: A speaker deliberately avoided naming the cerebellum when discussing motor-idea processing, noting that its role may be over-simplified and that gesturing toward it could be misinterpreted as advocating disconnection.

- **Desktop-scale high-speed 3-D printing**: A link to the arXiv paper “Fast desktop-scale extrusion additive manufacturing” (1709.05918) was shared as a promising route to rapid prototyping for bio- and hardware hackers.

- **China’s gene-editing backlash coverage**: Wired’s article on universal condemnation of the He Jiankui baby-editing incident was circulated; participants mocked the article’s warning that “careless gene editing could be even greater” than Shenzhen’s 2015 landslide of construction waste that buried buildings and workers.

- **“Bananas” Chinese progress trope**: Discussion referenced LitHub’s essay arguing that modern China’s pace and scale of change are so extreme they require a new literary genre, framing the gene-editing uproar within a broader cultural narrative of unchecked acceleration.