- New Scientist article on the Porphyromonas gingivalis (gum-disease bacterium) hypothesis for Alzheimer’s disease sparked debate; participants questioned why epidemiologists had not already observed a strong gum-disease/Alzheimer’s correlation and critiqued Alzheimer’s UK’s dismissal that “genetic factors” preclude an infectious component.

- Discussion of antibiotic brain penetration: doxycycline achieves ~0.6–1.1 µg/mL in cerebrospinal fluid after standard oral dosing, suggesting systemic antibiotics could in principle reach the CNS to target P. gingivalis if the hypothesis is validated.

- Mythic AI’s analog in-memory neural-network chips were highlighted; the architecture uses flash-transistor arrays as tunable resistors to perform multiply-accumulate operations in the analog domain, with ADCs providing ReLU-like nonlinearities.

- A speculative idea was floated that a fixed-weight neural-network ASIC (e.g., for speech recognition) could be implemented as a literal grid of fixed-value resistors, eliminating the need for programmable weights if the network never has to learn post-fabrication.

- Smithsonian Magazine article on “how to prepare for future gene-edited babies” was shared, prompting tongue-in-cheek suggestions about stockpiling gene guns and bunkers for DIY human genetic engineering.

- Aquarium.bio—an open-source lab-automation platform that separates human-readable protocols from machine-executable code—was mentioned as being used by “spreelanka”; participants compared it unfavorably to earlier work (jcline’s English-language protocol parser) that could automatically compile protocols into machine instructions.