- A new paper in PNAS (Koch et al., 2009) describes a “rosette-type, self-renewing human ES cell-derived neural stem cell” that can be instructed in vitro and shows synaptic integration potential, offering an apparently inexhaustible source of human neural cells for research or therapy.  
- kanzure posted the PhysOrg news summary and a direct PDF link to the full paper, making the primary source immediately available to the channel.  
- Discussion of laboratory-supply automation: kanzure contacted Carolina Biological Supply and Invitrogen to explore B2B/API access to their catalogs; the e-commerce director at Carolina scheduled a follow-up call, and Invitrogen’s e-procurement portal was highlighted as unusually hacker-friendly.  
- A brief exchange on package-manager design referenced the Smart Package Manager (cross-distro dependency solver) and an internal project named “Unify” that reportedly pursues similar goals.  
- A late query asked for a ranked list of current/prototypical propulsion systems for human Earth-to-Moon transit, from slowest to fastest, but no answers were logged in the excerpt.