- Hod Lipson’s upcoming UT Austin talk is being billed by the ADL lab as “the most important lecture of the year,” underscoring his influence in open-source fabrication and 3-D printing.  
- procto released “gelbox-o-matic,” a Python script (http://logarchy.org/electrophoresis.py) that auto-generates laser-cuttable SVG plans for DIY gel-electrophoresis boxes and optionally launches Inkscape on Windows.  
- A new open-source hardware directory at http://open-innovation-projects.org/ was praised for rich metadata fields but criticized for sparse entries and restrictive terms-of-use.  
- kanzure_ and fenn pushed back against a Singularity mailing-list post that equated the Singularity with financial-market prediction, arguing it misrepresents the core problem of forecasting systems more intelligent than ourselves.  
- fenn has published three years of personal sleep, diet, and web-usage logs at http://fennetic.net/sleep/; UtopiahGHML proposed mining Firefox’s SQLite history to create an AI “teacher” that recommends healthier browsing habits.  
- xp_prg released Biobench v0.03 (http://www.umassigem.org/biobench/biobench.html), a GPL-licensed, Flash-based graphical BioBrick design tool that exports SBML and can target synthesis services such as Blue Heron Bio.  
- Discussion surfaced undocumented “forward_efficiency” and “reverse_efficiency” parameters (0.309 and –0.368) on BioBrick terminator pages; fenn speculated they quantify directional polymerase drop-off, but no formal definition exists in the downloadable corpus at http://heybryan.org/books/biobricks/.  
- xp_prg sketched an end-to-end synthetic-biology workflow: graphical design → SBML simulation → DNA synthesis (DIY or Blue Heron) → transformation into E. coli/yeast, with a long-term vision of building static, retina-inspired biological CPUs.  
- Community members debated version-control strategies for open-innovation wikis, favoring git over rsync/Unison to prevent destructive overwrites, while lamenting Biobench’s Flash dependency that excludes terminal users and open-source runtimes.