- The channel discussed the first direct image of a black hole’s event horizon and accretion disk released by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration; links to the official press conference (https://eventhorizontelescope.org/) and an explanatory lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo) were shared.  
- superkuh pointed to APSYNSIM, an open-source radio-interferometric imaging simulator (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00936, https://launchpad.net/apsynsim), and provided a demo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1pLFzc7ZZY) to help understand how the black-hole image was synthesized and its potential artifacts.  
- A newly published paper (https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr/nwz043/5420749) describing transgenic rhesus monkeys engineered with extra copies of the human MCPH1 gene was introduced; the animals reportedly exhibit human-like neoteny in brain development.  
- Participants debated the broader implications of introducing human brain-development genes into non-human primates, including concerns that single-gene edits may not account for the systemic biological “scaffolding” required to support complex new structures or functions.  
- The conversation briefly referenced prior discussions of MCPH1 (microcephalin) differences between humans and other primates, and acknowledged the extensive bioethics literature critiquing such gene-editing experiments.