- A new feature-length CRISPR documentary titled “Human Nature” (directed by Adam Bolt, produced with Dan Rather) will premiere at SXSW; the film includes interviews with Jennifer Doudna, George Church, Feng Zhang, Alta Charo, and other key figures, and its website is https://www.humannaturefilm.com/.

- Channel members debated practical Linux CAD workflows for CNC machining: FreeCAD, SolveSpace, and BRL-CAD were recommended; nmz787 shared a Python wrapper (https://github.com/nmz787/python-brlcad-tcl) for programmatic geometry generation and STL export, noting BRL-CAD’s nanometre-to-metre dynamic range as a decisive advantage.

- Alibaba CNC vendors requested STEP files for polycarbonate part fabrication, prompting discussion of exporting from LibreCAD → BRL-CAD extrusion → STEP, versus direct design in FreeCAD.

- superkuh posted two speculative astrobiology papers: “Developing ecospheres on transiently habitable planets: the genesis project” (Springer, 2016) and “Why planetary and exoplanetary protection differ: the case of long-duration Genesis missions to habitable but sterile M-dwarf oxygen planets” (arXiv:1901.02286).

- A brief exchange on de-extincting Neanderthals concluded that existing ancient DNA is too fragmented; resurrection would require high-coverage sequencing, error-corrected genome reconstruction, and full synthetic genome assembly—currently deemed prohibitively expensive after the “Human Genome Project–Write” scaled back.