• Participants criticized the University of Texas “Design Repository” for its overly-abstract ontology that lists trivial items like “red LED” or “glue” without inheritance or quantitative specs, rendering it nearly useless for automated design or cross-product reuse.  
• A new position at UT’s Automated Design Lab was announced, focused on rating AI-generated designs, migrating the repository from C#/Java to open code, and making the dataset more practically useful.  
• The group debated whether graphene nanoribbons could outperform carbon-fiber composites; a Nature paper was cited showing PMMA nanofibers can be converted into graphene ribbons via in-situ electron-beam irradiation, though >200 kV setups would require costly SF₆ or oil insulation.  
• A home-built STM project using headphone piezos and hand-cut tips (schematics at http://heybryan.org/instrumentation/instru.html) was revisited, with enthusiasm for its potential as an analytical tool operable in liquids, despite no reported tests yet.  
• A DIY micro-gas-turbine whose case doubles as diffuser, stator-vane array, bearing mount, and thermal insulator was described; the creator reverse-engineered it while asking “how can I run my car on cardboard?” rather than copying plans.  
• A sunlight/UV-activated pen-and-transparency method for “sketching” microfluidic lab-on-a-chip devices was shared (New Scientist article), with open questions about what diagnostics can be performed with hand-drawn fluidic channels.  
• An 80 k-record material-property database was being compiled to support high-temperature, low-outgassing material selection, including normalized AISI 118 steel (Poisson 0.29, 1700 °F service) and a request for non-alumina substances stable at 1200 °C and 70 Torr.  
• vdash.org, a wiki-based project for collaborative, machine-verified mathematical proofs, was introduced via beamer slides, sparking debate over whether wikis or plain file distribution are better for crowd-sourced formal mathematics.