- A participant asked how to read the KEGG human amino-acid biosynthesis map (https://www.genome.jp/kegg-bin/show_pathway?org_name=hsa&mapno=01230) and how to distinguish the nine essential amino acids from the diagram; others pointed to the KEGG color-code legend (https://www.genome.jp/kegg/kegg1c.html) and alternative pathway resources such as MetaCyc (https://metacyc.org/) and ExPASy (https://www.expasy.org/).

- An open Slack-based hackathon (#autovax on https://join.slack.com/t/wuhan2020) was recruiting help for rapid COVID-19 vaccine and drug-design software, led by a Harvard virology/bioinformatics consultant and backed by a reported $150 M Chinese grant to Harvard & MIT.

- yashgaroth outlined a DIY plasmid-DNA vaccine approach modeled on Inovio’s work: design a plasmid expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, deliver it via electroporation into skin cells, and induce local inflammation to elicit anti-spike antibodies.

- Discussion questioned the rush to *design* vaccines from scratch; adlai suggested simply harvesting neutralizing antibodies from recovered patients as a faster, “copy-nature” route to an immediately deployable therapeutic.

- maaku shared a long-term project to create a constructed spoken language that encodes neo-Davidsonian event semantics for perfectly unambiguous communication; a working document (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-BclijZ_tgUPlibEUjazQmf8jg04w3IDX8Nzkm6L2io/edit) details the grammar, phoneme-assignment strategy, and analogy to Haskell’s radical purity versus incremental C++ evolution.

- kanzure announced the release of python-bitcoinlib v0.11.0, adding full SegWit support with example scripts for P2WPKH and P2WSH transactions (https://github.com/petertodd/python-bitcoinlib).