- Open-source DNA sequencing hardware: the Polonator (polonator.org) is a working, fully open-source pyrosequencer; kanzure posted notes and links to a talk by its inventor, Mostafa Ronaghi, estimating that future de-novo sequencing could generate zettabytes of data.  
- Pyrosequencing process discussion: fenn questioned whether random primers are necessary and proposed an “inchworm” strategy where the tail of one read primes the next, enabling massively parallel extension on the same instrument.  
- DIY materials & fabrication: links shared for lost-foam metal casting (buildyouridea.com/foundry), zinc furnaces, and free-form colloidal extrusion of piezo ceramics (Prof. Smay’s lab at Oklahoma State).  
- Semantic-web tooling exploration: fenn compared DTD, XML Schema, and BNF grammars for representing procedural knowledge, suggesting SVG diagrams as a human-readable way to encode casting instructions.  
- Bookmark-management pain point: kanzure reported that Opera’s bookmark editor takes ~40 s per entry when handling 2.6 MB of bookmarks, highlighting a need for better large-scale knowledge-capture tools.  
- Community resources surfaced: SNPedia (personal genomics wiki), MicrobeWiki (run by sci-fi author Joan Slonczewski), and the BioMine wiki for mining-biotech integration.