- OpenAI released “o1-preview” (internally “Strawberry / Q*”), a model family that explicitly spends extra compute on internal “thinking” or reflection before responding; early testers in the channel found the improvement underwhelming so far.  
- Discussion framed the release as a hurried response to open-source “reflection tuning” techniques already circulating, with speculation that Microsoft’s $10 B+ investment is largely a lever to sell Azure cloud capacity rather than a bet on model quality.  
- A cryonics anecdote highlighted a practical failure mode: a Cryonics Institute bracelet’s emergency instructions were printed in red ink and became illegible when covered in blood, prompting suggestions to improve durability and readability of such critical identifiers.  
- A 2013 paper on “enzyme-free translation of DNA into sequence-defined synthetic polymers structurally unrelated to nucleic acids” was shared (PDF link provided), illustrating efforts to move genetic information into non-natural polymer backbones without biological enzymes.  
- Post-mortem cell viability data were circulated: human white blood cells survive 60–86 h after organismal death, mouse skeletal-muscle cells remain culturable up to 14 days, and sheep/goat fibroblasts for ~1 month—information relevant to tissue banking and cryobiology protocols.