- Josiah Zayner’s team reports six months of R&D that eliminated CO₂ incubators, culture hoods and expensive media, yielding a protocol for consistently growing and engineering HEK-293 cells outside traditional lab infrastructure; a public class on the method is being offered.  
- Miller Lab at Rice is open-sourcing a pneumatic bioprinter (GitHub: OpenSourcePneumaticSystem) and sacrificial-casting techniques to create centimeter-scale tissues with perfusable multivascular networks, raising the question of what still limits organoid size to a few centimeters despite successful vascularization.  
- Recent organoid advances discussed include “An in vivo model of functional and vascularized human brain organoids” (Nature Biotech 2018), “Cell diversity and network dynamics in photosensitive human brain organoids” (Nature 2017), and “Individual brain organoids reproducibly form cell diversity of the human cerebral cortex” (Nature 2019), with emphasis on 3D-suspension protocols that let iPSCs self-organize into cortical-column-like structures.  
- A sleep-memory study (“Explicit memory creation during sleep demonstrates a causal role of place cells in navigation,” Nature Neurosci 2015) was highlighted: CA1 place-cell firing during slow-wave sleep was paired with reward-area stimulation, biasing awake mice to revisit the corresponding location, illustrating closed-loop hippocampal manipulation.  
- Discussion of cross-phyla neural homology referenced Nicholas Strausfeld’s work showing insect and mammalian circuits for smell, memory, navigation and vision are nearly identical despite non-overlapping gene sets, prompting debate that sensory organs are shaped “from the outside in” by environmental signal statistics rather than strictly by genetic pre-specification.  
- A request circulated for a US university proxy to download a HathiTrust-locked book on Babel, noting that LibGen/Sci-Hub do not carry it.  
- A community call asked for someone near Hayward, CA to pick up auctioned pipettes and forward them to Europe, illustrating ongoing informal logistics for low-cost lab hardware.  
- Industruino ($100 industrial Arduino variant) and a stretchable, self-healing triboelectric-nanogenerator conductor (Nature Comms 2019) were flagged as potentially useful open-source hardware components.