• Netflix released a trailer for “Unnatural Selection,” a documentary series focused on DIY gene editing and transhumanist themes.  
• Peter Thiel’s VC firm announced “Hereticon,” an invite-only conference whose agenda lists “biological self-determination (modification, design), geo-engineering, transhumanism, immortality, genetically modified humans, and the DNA-I.Q. crowd,” prompting public criticism from Antonio Regalado and others.  
• A new biorxiv preprint describes a petascale, automated pipeline for high-throughput transmission-electron-microscopy circuit mapping of neurons, developed with Allen Institute collaborators.  
• Arxiv paper “Identifying weights and architectures of unknown ReLU networks” outlines a method to reverse-engineer black-box neural networks, while a companion neural-decoding tutorial and code package were released by the Kording Lab.  
• Octant Bio (co-founded by Sri Kosuri) published “Octopus,” a plasmid-sequencing workflow for multiplexed functional genomics, and linked to updated MAPseq data mapping 50 k cortical neurons.  
• Discussion of open-source vs. commercial finite-element modeling tools: Elmer (thermal, mechanical, electromagnetic), OpenFOAM, CalculiX, FreeCAD integration, and the perennial advice to “just use COMSOL and SolidWorks.”  
• Links to Berkeley AI Research blog on using evolutionary algorithms and learned surrogates to accelerate analog integrated-circuit design, plus a new PNAS paper on vesicle-release plasticity measured via nanometer-resolution techniques.  
• Gizmodo and Kaiser Health News articles on NAD-boosting “longevity pills” were shared, with skepticism about mouse-to-human translation.  
• Critique of a Singularity Hub piece on ultra-cheap, zero-waste 3-D printing for lacking historical context (RepRap, patent expiration) and of outdated launch-cost figures ($10 k/lb vs. current ~$1 k/lb).