- AMD’s MI300X accelerator card was highlighted as an unusually large “chonky” piece of hardware, signaling the trend toward ever-more-massive AI compute packages.  
- University of Southampton’s “5D crystal” glass storage—claimed to last 300 quintillion years at room temperature—was discussed as the most durable known digital medium, with SPIE technical details on femtosecond-laser nanostructure writing shared.  
- The spontaneous formation of the laser-induced nanostructures in that glass was noted to remain a physics mystery despite multiple attempts at explanation.  
- RF Diffusion, the RoseTTAFold-based generative protein-design tool from Baker Lab, was announced as now free and open-source, expanding access to state-of-the-art protein structure generation.  
- A historical note pointed out that the microscope was invented roughly a century before the first observation of “animalcules,” underscoring the lag between tool creation and biological discovery.