- Jiankui He (CRISPR-baby scientist) has begun deleting his old tweets about embryo editing, including the announcement of the first donation to the “Lulu and Nana Foundation”; kanzure archived the text for posterity.  
- FORCE (“first-order reduced and controlled error”) learning was highlighted as a candidate algorithm for closed-loop, large-parameter ML systems that could externally steer human learning without relying on the subject’s working memory.  
- Participants revisited 2023 Nature and Wiley papers on “compliant mechanisms” and “origami antennas,” then asked whether earlier work on gallium-based fluidic antennas (liquid metal in microfluidic elastomer channels) ever matured beyond the lab stage.  
- ModularDeepLearning.com was shared as a new framework for building composable, reusable deep-learning components; skeptics noted that releasing source code is meaningless if training a model still costs a billion dollars.  
- A 2019 ScienceDirect paper on in-vitro cortical columns in hydrogel scaffolds sparked discussion of assembling many such columns on an “alginate circuit board,” inserting synthetic vasculature for nutrient delivery, and wiring them together to mimic cortical connectivity.  
- Risks and ethics of autologous brain-tissue transplants were debated: teratomas from incompletely differentiated iPSCs, infection, epilepsy, angiogenesis failure, and the regulatory barrier that terminal patients who might volunteer are kept out of trials.  
- CDC data showing chronic wasting disease (CWD) prions jumping to macaques via consumption of asymptomatic deer meat was circulated as a cautionary example of low-probability, high-impact neurodegenerative threats.