- OpenAI board turmoil: a participant quotes the board’s claim that “letting the company be destroyed would be consistent with the mission,” highlighting the apparent contradiction between this stance and their insistence that the crisis is “not about AI safety.”

- New longevity research shared: Church-lab pre-print identifies the RNA-binding protein SRSF1 as a rejuvenation factor—over-expression shifts the transcriptome to a “younger” state, improves senescence markers, proteasome function, collagen production, and wound healing in vitro and in vivo.

- Anti-aging strategy debate: kanzure argues that while repairing adult aging is worthwhile, the field should devote more resources to deploying known longevity interventions via the germline so future generations benefit even if current adults do not.

- Bio-vs-computer cognition discussion: participants explore why software engineers struggle with biology—proposed causes include lack of hands-on failure experience, limited working memory, competitive pressure to stay narrowly focused, and the absence of biology “problem sets” that force abstraction into memory.

- Technical links circulated:  
  – “In silico morphogenetic engineering with differentiable programming” (ISAL 2023)  
  – Tardigrade DNA-repair up-regulation study (bioRxiv)  
  – DNA microscopy for volumetric imaging of intact organisms (bioRxiv)  
  – Height-GWAS pre-print reporting 29 new loci with effect sizes up to ±7 cm (bioRxiv)  
  – “Fish Playpens,” an open-source acrylic insert that lets a standard 10 L zebrafish rack raise 12 individually tracked juveniles without growth penalty.

- Media and culture notes:  
  – Stable Video Diffusion open-source video-generation model announced by Stability.ai.  
  – Reddit’s SneerClub (a hub for critiquing rationalist/EA ideas) reportedly shut down; discussion links to successor communities and debates its role in academic pushback.  
  – Protein emoji proposal was rejected (Twitter thread).