- A 220-nucleotide covalently closed circular RNA was highlighted that exhibits “endless translation with no stop codon,” challenging conventional models of gene expression (PMC4209996, PMC4639774).  
- Viroids—246–467 nt plant pathogens—were compared to the smallest viruses (~2,000 nt), underscoring their extreme molecular minimalism and potential as ultra-compact genetic systems.  
- Prions were introduced as even smaller self-propagating agents, consisting solely of misfolded proteins that template further misfolding, raising questions about the lower size limits of biological information transfer.  
- A 13-year-old’s completion of the “Microprocessor for You in Thirty Hours” (MYTH) workshop was noted, demonstrating that complete RISC-V CPU cores can be designed and built in days rather than semesters.  
- Dmitry Grinberg’s teardown of the Nintendo Pokéwalker was shared as an example of ultra-low-power embedded hardware reverse-engineering.  
- Resources for testing and understanding database concurrency anomalies were collected, including the Hermitage test suite for PostgreSQL, the “ACIDRain” paper on web-application attacks, and UIUC CS425 lecture slides on RPC-based distributed transactions.