- A debate arose over whether “leaky” COVID-19 vaccines could drive the evolution of more virulent strains, with participants drawing an explicit analogy to Marek’s disease in chickens—where imperfect vaccination led to hyper-pathogenic viral variants—and noting that antibiotic resistance differs because resistance alone does not inherently increase bacterial lethality.  
- kanzure shared a new CRISPR base-editing paper, “Rationally designed base editors for precise editing of the sickle cell disease mutation,” highlighting progress toward single-nucleotide correction of the HBB E6V mutation (DOI: 10.1089/crispr.2020.0144).  
- A companion news article on “inlaid base editors” was linked, describing engineered deaminase fusions that slide sequence windows to raise on-target efficiency while reducing off-target edits (GEN News Insights).  
- The channel noted the emergence of Verilog2Factorio, an open-source project that compiles digital logic designs written in Verilog into functional circuits inside the game Factorio, effectively turning the game into a visual hardware-simulation sandbox (GitHub: Redcrafter/verilog2factorio).  
- Participants tracked the rapid growth of the Chia cryptocurrency network, citing real-time charts showing exponential expansion in netspace and anticipating a looming global shortage of both consumer and enterprise hard-disk drives.  
- A dedicated energy-tracking site, chiapower.org, was referenced to quantify total power draw of the Chia network, prompting discussion about whether the protocol will disproportionately consume low-power archival drives versus high-performance storage.  
- Cisco’s warning that the semiconductor shortage will persist for at least another six months was circulated from Hacker News, underscoring ongoing supply-chain constraints affecting compute, storage, and bio-hardware projects alike.