- Discussion of the He Jiankui CRISPR-baby scandal: participants note reports that the Chinese scientist may face the death penalty, debate whether China would openly embrace or publicly punish such work, and half-seriously propose planning a “rescue.”  
- Link shared: Gizmodo article “Chinese Scientist Who Created CRISPR Babies Could Face the Death Penalty, Fellow Geneticist Warns.”  
- Neuroscience preprint highlighted: “Systematic errors in connectivity inferred from activity in strongly coupled recurrent circuits” (bioRxiv 512053) – cautionary note on interpreting functional-connectivity data.  
- Replication Markets project seeks journal partners for a large-scale replication trial; announcement from Robin Hanson’s Overcoming Bias blog circulated.  
- Nature Machine Intelligence journal boycott noted; Forbes piece summarizing why prominent AI researchers refuse to submit to the closed-access journal.  
- Reflective Disequilibrium post on “Financial returns of interstellar colonization for the sedentary” – economic analysis of whether stationary investors could profit from interstellar ventures.  
- BBC/ScienceAlert coverage of the “wood-wide web”: plants exchange carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus via mycorrhizal networks; original 1997 Nature paper by Suzanne Simard flagged for easy future retrieval.  
- New microbiology finding: Vibrio cholerae uses retractable type-IV pili to “fish” environmental DNA into the cell during natural transformation; Nature Microbiology retraction note linked.