- 23andMe’s reverse-merger via a SPAC (special-purpose acquisition company) was flagged as a milestone for direct-to-consumer genomics going public.  
- NIH’s “Brain Connectivity Workshop Series” was live-streamed, focusing on the significance and technical challenges of mapping complete neural circuits.  
- A forthcoming Zoom webinar on RFID and other human implants was announced, promising discussion of functional consequences and real-world use cases.  
- NANOGrav’s pulsar-timing data suggesting a nano-Hz gravitational-wave background was linked to possible sources: super-massive black-hole mergers, cosmic strings, or primordial black holes (Physical Review Letters papers provided).  
- The open-hardware “Balthazar” laptop project was shared—its design includes a detachable USB gender-changer dongle and modular, privacy-centric components.  
- Ethical and practical aspects of commercial surrogacy were debated, including “baby mills,” cross-border legal restrictions, and the psychological risks of surrogate attachment.  
- Participants weighed the morality of growing human clones or genetically modified animals for organ harvesting, with “ghost organs” (decellularized scaffolds seeded with patient cells) proposed as a less ethically fraught alternative.  
- TabooTrades.com, a satirical “moral-goods exchange,” was introduced—illustrating how negative externalities (e.g., abortions, missionary work) could be traded for net-positive outcomes under a tongue-in-cheek utilitarian framework.  
- Dimensional Energy’s XPRIZE entry for solar thermochemical CO₂-to-fuel conversion was critiqued: concentrated solar mirrors may lose to low-cost plastic photocatalyst sheets that could turn farmland into fuel-producing surfaces.  
- The newspaper Python library’s automatic article summarization capability was demonstrated, extracting key sentences (e.g., 325 tonnes/year of micro-plastics from Norwegian fish-farm feed pipes).