- Bryan Bishop (kanzure) updated his public stem-cell paper collection to include the piggyBac transposon and virus-free induction-of-pluripotency papers at http://heybryan.org/books/Biology/stemcells/.

- A long discussion centered on Marangoni-force microfluidics: Basu’s thesis on 16×8 surface-mount-resistor heater arrays that drive droplets at 5 mm/s with <25 mW, and the idea of replicating the effect without custom PCBs.

- Links to several microfluidics papers were shared: thermocapillary droplet actuation on patterned surfaces, virtual traps/filters/channels via Marangoni flows, and droplet-based cooling of integrated circuits.

- katsmeow-afk surfaced 2005 Georgia Tech work on wafer-level microchannels etched >100 µm into the back of silicon chips for on-die liquid cooling of 3-D stacked processors.

- kanzure noted a CPAN chemistry module (PerlMol-0.35) for parsing molecular formulas and the FuGE functional-genomics data model (fuge.sf.net) that uses ontology terms to describe protocols, materials, and equipment.

- fenn asked for Austin sources of “fancy” metals (tool steel) and scrap yards; kanzure reported that local searches only turn up automotive junkyards.

- A brief debate on web-scraping the Dell Social Innovation Competition site revealed that its heavy JavaScript breaks standard WWW::Mechanize crawlers, prompting kanzure to reverse-engineer the JS by hand.

- kanzure volunteered to write a review on automated assembly design and automatic instruction generation, stating he would likely implement the code himself from assembly-representation data structures.