- Thin-film interference and ellipsometry were introduced as practical optical techniques for characterizing thin films, with a pointer to an open textbook chapter and a Wikipedia overview.  
- Sci-Hub’s intermittent downtime was noted, highlighting its continuing role as a critical open-access tool for researchers.  
- A debate on institutional oversight erupted around He Jiankui–style human-subjects research, questioning whether university IRBs have jurisdiction when work is done abroad and without federal or institutional resources.  
- Bryan Bishop posted a rapid series of detailed transcripts from the 2019 Stanford Blockchain Conference covering privacy-preserving multi-hop locks, HTLC security issues, state channels, ASIC design, formal verification, vulnerability detection, Miniscript, Bitcoin fee economics, coordinated upgrades, and the “Spork” soft-fork proposal; links are archived at diyhpl.us/diyhpluswiki.  
- Participants criticized mainstream formal-verification talks for ignoring sub-Turing (Turing-incomplete) languages such as Simplicity and Crema, which constrain expressiveness to make exhaustive verification tractable.  
- A Current Biology paper on closed-loop auditory stimulation during slow-wave sleep was shared, showing improved word-pair learning when tones are timed to excitability peaks.  
- The impending end of gamete-donor anonymity via consumer genomics was discussed, with a 2016 paper cited and a proposed counter-strategy of flooding databases with synthetic “chaff” genomes to increase search costs.  
- Vernor Vinge’s novel Rainbows End was referenced for its “Friends of Privacy” who inject false data to protect anonymity, prompting skepticism about whether such obfuscation ultimately favors elites.  
- NASA’s FITS World Coordinate System documentation and an IEET essay “Can We Save Freedom by Hiding?” were linked as further reading on privacy and astronomical data standards.