• MIT Media Lab’s Alec Resnick posted his Fab Lab application portfolio online, revealing a Pylons/Dojo web app for mapping local DIY resources (people, expertise, space, materials) and prompting discussion about nepotism and the gap between MIT’s admission process and its on-the-ground culture.

• A DIYbio–Fab Lab meetup in Boston was documented in out-take videos (YouTube links shared) showing open access policies—walk-ins welcome during posted hours—and featuring Alec’s automated book scanner and casual footage of Sophia, Tom (Gershenfeld’s staff), and other MIT “medialab heads.”

• Channel members debated how to archive the transhumantech mailing-list threads; kanzure_ produced a one-command wget script that uses --convert-links (-k) to keep relative URLs pointing to the original postbiota.org archives, now mirrored at heybrian.org/~bbishop/docs/transhumantech/.

• Discussion of open-access publishing: PLoS Biology is experiencing “ridiculously high growth,” arXiv is praised for having solved preprint sharing in physics, and there is skepticism toward claims that Nature “owns” PLoS or DOAJ.

• IBM’s Blue Brain Project and related neuro-simulation funding were cited as the current high-profile efforts in AI/brain emulation, with UCSD’s neurotransceiver research noted as another active site.

• Plans emerged to attend CodeCon (San Francisco, April) and to create a consolidated portfolio page for open-manufacturing and other CC/GPL/GFDL-licensed hardware and software projects.

• Frustration was voiced over MIT’s emphasis on “teamwork” in admissions while rejecting web-based collaborative portfolios, leading to broader laments about the difficulty of coordinating distributed, garage-level engineering over the internet despite the high concentration of “cool projects” at MIT.