• Veritas Genetics is permanently abandoning consumer whole-genome sequencing and refunding 2018 orders, pivoting entirely to COVID-19 PCR testing, marking a major retreat in low-cost personal genomics.  
• Nanotronics (advanced imaging + robotics) is hiring a software-engineering manager to lead optics-heavy robotics projects, signaling continued private investment in high-resolution automation.  
• Participants argue that macroscopic self-replicating machine tools must be solved before any nanoscale replicators can succeed, tracing the idea back to the 2007 SKDB project and ##hplusroadmap’s founding ontology discussions.  
• A licensing schism emerged: one faction plans to use AGPL to force open-source reciprocity, while others favor permissive BSD/COIL/public-domain licenses to dodge GPL incompatibility and jurisdiction-specific issues such as Norway’s rights-management fees.  
• Practical career advice: unpaid US internships still gatekeep entry into space, molecular-nanotech, and life-extension fields, favoring applicants with external financial support; veterans recommend sustained 5–10-year solo effort on an open life-extension wiki as the most reliable path to community traction.  
• Wikipedia’s recent deletion campaigns against transhumanist scientists and concepts are viewed as a strategic threat, prompting calls to contribute instead to independent wikis or specialized repositories.  
• A proposed “ALGPL” license would require source release for network services without virally infecting client code; no existing license meets this need, while the new COIL license (Apache-2.0 minus patent clauses) is debated as either a pragmatic fix or license proliferation.  
• Key research links circulated: Frontiers paper on non-invasive spinal neuromodulation for gait control and a bioRxiv pre-print describing a closed-loop artificial ecosystem designed for long-term human survival on the Moon (bioRxiv 2021.01.12.426282).