• Algae-to-fuel skepticism: attendees of a biofuel conference dismissed industry claims that algae could supply 30 million barrels per day by 2028, instead proposing a self-scaling “living infrastructure” in which the algae themselves secrete plastics or vanadium-rich components during bloom cycles.

• Viral lipid-extraction strategy: participants explored using lytic viruses (PBCV-1, CsNIV, PCMV, VcaOssV) to rupture algae cells at low energy cost, considering both engineering algae to display viral-recognition proteins and applying directed evolution to adapt viruses to the high-lipid species Neochloris oleoabundans.

• Personalized oncolytic therapy: Andrew Hessel’s SENS3 talk (108 MB FLV) was highlighted for advocating patient-specific viral synthesis—designing oncolytic viruses tailored to an individual’s cancer genome as a form of precision tumor therapy.

• Open-source bio-design toolkit: a multi-language project (C#, JS, Perl, HTML/CSS) combining GraphSynth graph search, a tree-crawler, and a database interface was released to automate synthetic-biology and mechanical-design exploration; download at http://heybryan.org/graph/2008-11-20.zip.

• DIY CNC workflow: the channel converged on using EMC’s built-in image-to-gcode script plus Blender height-map scripts as interim solutions for driving a Probotix Fireball desktop mill until better open-source 3-D-to-G-code software emerges.

• Historical micro-alga source: the 1962 paper by Chantanachat & Bold, “Some algae from arid soils,” was cited as the first isolation of Neochloris from Saudi Arabian desert sand rather than an aquatic environment, underscoring its extremophile potential.

• Ultrasonic bacterial transformation: a 40 kHz ultrasonoporation protocol for high-efficiency bacterial transformation was shared, along with a curated directory of biology texts and viral-lysis papers at heybryan.org/bioreactor/lysis/.

• Megascale computation debate: participants questioned the practicality of “Jupiter brains” and fluid-dynamics-based “ocean intelligences,” focusing on heat-dissipation limits, spherical geometry constraints, and the predictability of turbulent flows in large-scale computronium.