- A newly discovered “nitroplast” organelle is being evaluated as a route to endow staple crops with autonomous nitrogen fixation; most current work focuses on transferring the nitrogen-fixing pathway into plant cells rather than engineering the nitroplast itself.  
- Minicircle’s follistatin gene-therapy claims drew heavy skepticism: critics argue the stated plasmid dose (≈50 µg) would require 1000-fold better plasmid performance than state-of-the-art, and the Tet-Off antibiotic switch adds needless complexity and bulk.  
- Sarah Constantin’s Substack review of the Minicircle program is judged “wrong” by participants; a detailed debunking is being prepared and will be circulated once finished.  
- Discussion of non-viral DNA delivery methods concluded that polyplexes and naked plasmid are cheap and safe but inefficient, and any system that evades immunity well enough to replace viral vectors would also constitute a potent dual-use bioweapon.  
- Participants weighed the feasibility of subdermal “micro-bioreactors” (millimeter-scale dialysis capsules colonized by engineered microbes or yeast) for continuous drug production; concerns include LPS toxicity, containment failure, and preferential use of cell-free or dialysis-tube systems instead.  
- A NASA-affiliated patent (WO2020159603A2) describing an “asymmetrical electrostatic pressure” thruster was debated; although framed as a reactionless drive, it may instead be an inefficient photon thruster or measurement artifact, and similar past devices were recalled.  
- Theoretical loopholes for apparent reactionless propulsion—such as axion or neutrino rockets, negative inertial mass, or symmetry-breaking magnet switching—were discussed in the context of Noether’s theorem and conservation laws.  
- A Nature Communications paper on an implantable silicon-nanopore renal-cell bioreactor was cited as the closest peer-reviewed precedent to the proposed microbe-based implants.