- The ethics of human genetic engineering were debated via an Undark article that labels cautious, non-coercive embryo selection as “soft eugenics,” a framing the channel dismissed as unhelpful.  
- Participants asked which current brain simulations are both biologically faithful yet avoid strict neuronal reductionism; emergent (formerly Leabra) was highlighted as an actively-developed framework that uses synchronous bidirectional activation, sparse firing, and ion-channel dynamics instead of standard backprop.  
- A tweet thread by François Chollet was cited to argue that modern deep-learning successes have abandoned almost all originally “bio-inspired” elements (sigmoid activations, spiking networks, Hebbian learning), suggesting brute-force experimentation outperforms brain-mimetic theory.  
- The acute global shortage of healthy post-mortem human brains for research was documented: U.S. law prohibits buying/selling human tissue, the NIH NeuroBioBank distributes only “thousands” of samples yearly, and major banks like McLean and the South Australian Brain Bank have hit capacity or are receiving almost no normal donations.  
- Recent technical papers shared include: (1) Nature Biotechnology on RNA recording in single bacterial cells via reprogrammed tracrRNAs (TIGER system); (2) improved cytosine base editors evolved by phage-assisted selection of a deoxyadenosine deaminase; and (3) a Cell “transcription-factor atlas” mapping directed differentiation of human cells.  
- Links collected for further reading: emergent simulator (github.com/emer/emergent), its companion textbook at compcogneuro.org, Cerenaut’s AGI research roadmap, and a short story PDF “The Epiphany of Gliese 581.”