- A pre-print on bioRxiv reports “Goal-directed learning in cortical organoids,” describing cultured human brain tissue that appears to exhibit reinforcement-learning-like behavior, raising questions about emergent intelligence in vitro.  
- Two MIT papers were circulated: a 2018 “Neural network quine” (self-replicating neural weights) and “Generating neural networks with neural networks,” exploring meta-architectures that design and instantiate other networks.  
- A Nature Communications article, “Tomography of memory engrams in self-organizing nanowire connectomes,” presents a method to image and reconstruct functional memory traces within random nanowire networks, blurring the line between hardware and biological memory.  
- An ACS Nano paper claims “Integer factorization from percolating networks of nanoparticles,” suggesting that disordered nanoparticle films can physically solve NP-hard problems; channel participants expressed skepticism about reproducibility, comparing it to prior “potato computer” claims.  
- A 2003 technical report, “Pattern recognition in a bucket of water,” was resurfaced as a tongue-in-cheek reference to “water memory,” prompting discussion on unconventional substrates for physical intelligence.  
- A link to the AI Weirdness blog (aiweirdness.com) was shared as a source of examples of emergent, often bizarre behaviors in large generative models.  
- Conversation briefly touched on Turritopsis dohrnii (the “immortal jellyfish”) and axolotl regeneration as potential model organisms for longevity and regenerative medicine studies.