- The open-source drug-discovery platform OSDD.net, backed by $150 M from the Indian government, was criticized for showing only a handful of active users on its public TWiki, raising doubts about its early traction and governance model.  
- DARPA’s “REALNOSE” program at Carnegie Mellon is recruiting post-docs to build biologically-based chemical sensor arrays, illustrating military interest in synthetic olfaction and bio-inspired threat detection.  
- Graphene printed circuits (arXiv 0809.1634) and graphene-based energy-storage devices were highlighted as near-term routes to flexible electronics and ultra-high-capacity batteries, with PhysOrg coverage circulated as a quick primer.  
- The “Cepheid Galactic Internet” paper (arXiv 0809.0339) proposed modulating Cepheid variable stars to create interstellar beacons, adding a SETI-oriented, long-range communications concept to the channel’s far-future toolkit.  
- Rogers Aerospace released RASAero, free aerodynamic-analysis software positioned as an open alternative to OpenFOAM for rocketry and aerospace hobbyists, lowering the barrier to entry for amateur launch-vehicle design.  
- A dirt-cheap DIY microscopy method—two glass slides hot-glued and rubber-banded to a plastic frame—was shared for live observation of organisms like dragonfly larvae, aimed at democratizing biology education.  
- Kanzure’s “autozen” Perl script, which cycles PDFs on a monitor for communal paper-reading sessions, was revisited; participants debated packaging it for apt-get and curating shared reading lists to reduce duplicated literature searches.  
- BioPerl’s role in synthetic biology was dissected: the library excels at automating mundane bioinformatics chores (BLAST parsing, format conversion) but offers little high-level biological insight, underscoring the need to define research questions before choosing tools.  
- The article “How Perl Saved the Human Genome” (bioperl.org/wiki/How_Perl_saved_human_genome) was cited as a canonical example of open-source scripting enabling large-scale genomic data processing during the Human Genome Project.  
- Broader discussions framed open-source biology, distributed manufacturing, and DIY science as stepping-stones toward post-scarcity economics and an agalmic, post-labor society, tying current grassroots efforts to transhumanist ideals.