• A new graph-learning framework called MechRetro promises template-free, chemically-mechanism-driven retrosynthesis prediction and pathway planning (arXiv:2210.02630).  
• The community is experimenting with the USPTO-50k dataset—50 000 curated patent reactions (1976-2016)—as the only large public source for training these models, with ready-to-use loaders in DeepChem.  
• Open-source code and SaaS tools are emerging: GitHub repos for DeepChem, MEGAN (molecule.one), and several ICML papers on learning graph models for retrosynthesis are being actively shared.  
• Participants are stress-testing these tools on hard targets such as vitamin B12 synthesis to gauge real-world usefulness.  
• In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s venture arm) has invested in Colossal Biosciences’ woolly-mammoth “de-extinction” project; discussion frames the move as a strategic play to secure U.S. leadership—and ethical leverage—in advanced biotechnology.  
• OpenAI’s Whisper automatic-speech-recognition model is praised for running well on consumer laptops (CPU) and even better on A100 GPUs; batching jobs on Google Cloud can cut transcription costs dramatically (AssemblyAI benchmark).  
• GitHub Actions is being explored as a low-friction way to distribute sophisticated bioinformatics pipelines that users can clone and run entirely through the web interface, though “independence” from GitHub itself is questioned.  
• Practical Starlink field reports note reliable 50–100 Mbps rural service with rare dropouts, prompting plans for UPS backup and optimism about 7–10× bandwidth gains with Gen2 satellites.