• Israel’s large-scale desalination program is highlighted as proof that the “desalination era” has arrived, with implications for future water-abundant societies (Scientific American article shared).

• Harvard’s Wyss Institute published a Nature Communications paper on “light-powered enzymatic DNA synthesis,” offering a potentially faster, cleaner alternative to traditional phosphoramidite chemistry.

• ThirdLaw Molecular demonstrated one day of automated spiroligomer synthesis yielding ~150 distinct programmable-matter molecules whose sequence-defined shapes include aerogel-like “puffy” structures; an in-house Cando-based application designs sequences, drives robotic synthesizers, and curates chemical-formula databases for rapid feedback.

• DeepMind released FermiNet, a neural-network architecture that computes ground-state electronic wavefunctions “from first principles,” pushing the boundary of ab-initio quantum chemistry and materials modeling.

• Stanford HAI advocates a “National Research Cloud” to guarantee continued U.S. innovation by providing academic and startup researchers with shared high-end compute, datasets, and AI tooling.

• Reconstruct Inc.’s platform for remote construction-progress monitoring via photogrammetry and AI analytics is noted as an example of real-world computer-vision deployment.

• Discussion threads question why landmark software projects (Linux, QEMU) never produced formal research papers, and whether the absence of academic write-ups accelerates or hinders cumulative progress in computing.

• Philosophical riffing invokes McKenna’s idea that the Singularity is a “teleological attractor” whose perceived proximity is constant, alongside playful references to the “Black Iron Prison” and the non-metric nature of counter-entropic attractor states.