- A New Scientist article on microscopic “biobots” controlled by light was shared; participants discussed racing or warring the bots and noted that the light-guidance is fast but the bacterial swimmers themselves are slow.  
- kanzure linked his prior “in-vitro liquid wars” project (http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/In_vitro_liquid_wars) as a similar concept and briefly considered challenging the newly-issued patent.  
- The channel debated public logging of #hplusroadmap; procto offered a simple bot and kanzure posted an archive of existing logs at http://heybryan.org/~bbishop/docs/logs/.  
- DIY electrocompetent E. coli protocol was posted (http://bitesizebio.com/2008/11/25/diy-electrocompetent-e-coli/) and later a rat-neuron-in-a-dish flight-control experiment was shared (http://ovablastic.blogspot.com/2008/11/rats-neurons-in-dish-learn-how-to-fly.html).  
- A new CVD diamond-growth breakthrough promising unlimited lab-grown diamond size was circulated (PNAS paper and New Scientist coverage), with speculation that ultra-strong microspheres or fibers could solve lightweight hydrogen tankage for VentureStar-type RLVs.  
- kanzure prototyped a 3-D spiral geometry generator for membrane-less filtration devices, producing parametric gnuplot scripts and PNG visualizations, and planned to import the meshes into OpenFOAM for fluid simulation.  
- OpenFOAM, PyFoam, VTK, and the Vascular Modeling Toolkit (vmtk) were discussed as open-source tools for CFD and 3-D meshing; gene resolved to move to Linux to run OpenFOAM.  
- A culinary “biotech” experiment was described: using xanthan gum to extrude stable, noodle-like gels from broth via syringe into plastic tubes, offering a playful entry point to edible hydrogel design.  
- Algae-harvesting concepts included a paddle-wheel barge system and the idea of linear algae replication inside capillaries or sheet-like photobioreactors fed by coal-plant exhaust.  
- Aaron Swartz’s early RSS work and DarkBASIC game-development anecdotes surfaced in a side discussion on BASIC as a learning language versus modern scripting alternatives.