# IRC Log Summary - December 28, 2016

* Several neuroscience papers were shared, including research on super-resolution imaging of synaptic receptors, quantitative mRNA imaging in Drosophila brains using fluorescence in situ hybridization without molecular amplification, and transcranial stimulation enhancing memory-relevant sleep oscillations.

* A novel approach for expressing light-sensitive membrane channels at synapses in an activity-dependent way was discussed, which would allow mapping of previously active synapses and selective re-activation of neurons at specific sites, potentially unveiling the "synaptic engram."

* Participants discussed chip design protocols and standards for communication between sub-blocks in SoCs (System on Chips), including Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB), Open Core Protocol, and the optimization of these protocols based on information theory for specific applications.

* A discussion about JTAG over DCI (Direct Connect Interface) debugging capabilities for Intel processors took place, with references to a presentation from the 33C3 hacker conference titled "Tapping into the Core."

* A new Python-based tool called SkidL was shared, which allows circuit design through Python scripting rather than traditional schematic capture, potentially useful for PCB trace design with KiCad.

* Machine learning papers were shared, including "StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks" and "Scaling Memory-Augmented Neural Networks with Sparse Reads and Writes."