- Participants explored bypassing university bureaucracy by funding open-source CAD/manufacturing knowledge-base (SKDB) work as paid non-student research instead of enrolling in graduate programs.  
- A proposed business model for circumventing FDA and MTA restrictions involves selling GMO organisms that carry silent, restriction-enzyme-excisable plasmids as “bio-Easter eggs,” paired with an open web inventory/order system to let anyone request plasmids directly from BioBrick labs.  
- Rapid gel-electrophoresis techniques were refined: higher voltage/current with active cooling can reduce run time to ~1 hour without loss of resolution.  
- GraphSynth, an open-source graph-grammar CAD tool, was successfully compiled on Linux; it uses XML graphs and substitution rules to generate gear trains and other mechanisms, with ongoing work to encode sheet-metal folding and richer functional metadata.  
- Supermetal, a custom stochastic 3-D object assembler, was introduced; it builds shapes from geometric primitives and exports to standard CAD, with potential integration into GraphSynth and ADL/GraphSynth graphs.  
- A 2.9 GB, 1-million-rule XML corpus generated for user-preference modeling was deemed computationally intractable; participants recommended studying Wolfram’s substitution-systems chapter to reduce rule sets while preserving emergent complexity.  
- License-management debates rejected elaborate meta-license trackers in favor of simple LICENSE files plus diff tools, warning that aggressive GPL enforcement can deter open-hardware reuse and innovation.  
- Open-source EDA and mixed-signal simulation tools were surveyed (gEDA, ngspice, ktechlab, gpsim, Open Collector list), with consensus that digital simulation is hampered by missing transistor-level specifications.  
- Hod Lipson’s evolutionary-robotics work was proposed for autonomous robot ecologies in unstable mining environments, where robots iteratively design and build improved successors under harsh conditions.  
- Educational resources shared include neurophysiology lecture notes at http://heybryan.org/school/buildingbrains/ and links to burrtools, fennetic.net/cadwiki, appropedia.org, and Arduino forum discussions on open-hardware licensing.