- Rejuvenate Bio posted a pre-print showing that systemic—but liver- and gut-excluded—partial reprogramming via Yamanaka factors delivered with AAV extends median lifespan by ~7 % and reverses multiple age-related biomarkers in aged mice.  
- A Nature Scientific Reports paper identifies a single amino-acid change in TRPV1 that explains why some mammals are insensitive to capsaicin, highlighting a tractable route for engineering altered nociception or metabolic phenotypes.  
- New transformer-based model “pNovo” performs direct sequence-to-sequence translation from raw mass-spec peaks to peptide sequences, potentially automating de-novo proteomics workflows.  
- BioRxiv pre-print “RFdiffusion” introduces a generative denoising neural network that refines or completes partial protein backbones into full, physically plausible antibody designs, with an explanatory walkthrough at stephanheijl.com/rfdiffusion.html.  
- Review in Cell surveys the current biological mechanisms and clinical trajectories of phage therapy, emphasizing engineered phages and synthetic-biology approaches to overcome antibiotic resistance.  
- Discussion of the SF “Brains & Bites” meetup organized by E11 (Adam Marblestone, Todd Huffman, Jun Axup) centers on whether high-resolution micro-connectomic mapping of mammalian circuits is a necessary precursor to whole-brain emulation or merely an MVP for neuroscience tooling.  
- Participants debate the absence of a coherent Bay-Area neuroscience community, suggesting that 3Scan or Nectome should have catalyzed regular journal clubs or hackathons to fill the gap.  
- Anecdote surfaces of a circa-2015 startup pitch to create “smart pets” by humanizing FOXP2 (not FOXP3) in cats to enhance speech comprehension, with product parallels drawn to FluentPet soundboard systems.