- John Lamping’s 2016 talk “The One Weird Trick for Analyzing Big Data … Eyeball it Early and Often!” was shared; Lamping is noted for having “figured out (in the sense of Lévy) how to optimally reduce lambda-calculus expressions” and now works on human-longevity research.  
- A DIY “flame-etching” method for turning 90 µm tungsten wire into a scanning-electron-microscopy probe using only a household gas burner was demonstrated and photographed; the underlying technique is described in the paper “Flame-etched tungsten tips for scanning tunneling microscopy” (AIP 2019).  
- Attila Csordás’ pre-print “Somatic mutation lineage tracing as a systemic biomarker of human aging” (bioRxiv 2022.12.14.520419) was circulated, proposing that accumulated somatic mutation patterns could serve as a quantitative aging biomarker.  
- Discussion of the pre-print “Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging” (SSRN 3951490) questioned whether age-related methylation changes are causal or merely symptomatic; participants noted that lifestyle interventions can shift epigenetic clocks and speculated that reactivating early-development TET-mediated demethylation programs might restore youthful methylation patterns.  
- Debate on the evolutionary purpose of cellular aging: one hypothesis framed aging as a cancer-suppression mechanism, countered by evidence that cancer risk still rises with age due to accumulating mutational load and immune-system decline; the idea of storing tissue-specific “clean” DNA backups in lead vaults for periodic cell replacement was floated.  
- Participants highlighted the lack of industry-wide consensus on standardized aging biomarkers, attributing it to strong economic incentives for individual companies to have their own proprietary markers “win.”