- Two new Nature Biotechnology papers describe “time-tagged ticker tapes” and “optically readable self-assembling protein chains” that let cells record their own physiological histories, offering an in-vivo debugging tool for intracellular dynamics.  
- Discussion of patterned neuronal cultures led to the 2004 paper “Reliable neuronal logic devices from patterned hippocampal cultures,” showing neurons can be grown into predefined circuit shapes on flat substrates.  
- Participants debated the density and three-dimensionality of brain wiring versus microchip routing, sharing PCB autorouter images and multi-layer board photos to illustrate the contrast between planar electronics and volumetric neural connectivity.  
- A proposal emerged for 3-D printing cortical tissue by embedding neurite-growth proteins in precise paths inside a hydrogel, depositing neural stem cells voxel-by-voxel to build custom architectures without manually routing every axon.  
- The longest human brain axons (corticospinal tract and corpus callosum fibers) can exceed 30 cm, yet diffusion-MRI calibrated with histology estimates only ~6,200 axons link typical ipsilateral cortical areas and ~1,300 cross hemispheres, indicating surprisingly sparse long-range connectivity.  
- The “Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?” paper from the Kording lab was cited as a cautionary analogy for interpreting sparse, high-level brain connectomics data.  
- Autism was hypothesized to reflect a bias toward local rather than long-range cortical connectivity, prompting questions about valid animal models and the functional role of rare, privileged long-distance fibers.