- A new open synthetic-biology contest called GOGEC (Global Open Genetic Engineering Competition) is being launched on 23–25 Feb 2024 as a no-fee alternative to iGEM, whose team entry fees ($6 k) and per-member “grand jamboree” costs ($3 k + $550 each) were criticized as excessive and largely spent on a $10 M/year conference facility and yearly BioBrick shipments.

- Recent Nature paper “Orthogonal LoxPsym sites allow multiplexed site-specific recombination…” was highlighted; the method (nicknamed GEMbLeR) enables 120-fold dynamic range libraries for pathway-gene expression in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic hosts, with discussion on whether centralized PCR-spotted DNA “blotter paper” could replace individual Twist orders for standard parts.

- A GitHub project “Human-Brain-Rat” (bio-silicon synergetic learning systems) and an already-published arXiv paper on neural-signal analysis (2402.03316) were offered as collaboration entry points for open arXiv robotics publications.

- Long-distance, matter-penetrating data links were explored: arXiv paper 1506.07883 on electromagnetic modulation of monochromatic neutrino beams was cited as a possible replacement for under-sea cables, while axion-mediated photon conversion via strong magnetic fields was proposed as an alternative for point-to-point transmission through Earth.

- Rapid AI capability gains were surveyed: 13 ms Stable Diffusion image generation on consumer 4090 GPUs, 3-D shape generation from 2-D diffusion models using synthetic depth data, and the still-untapped “fast feed-forward” gating/sparsification techniques; the community was pointed to a curated list of immediately usable open LLM advances (LocalLLaMA “LLM Enlightenment” thread).