- Fab-lab licensing controversy: MIT’s Amy Sun promotes a restrictive “personal & experimental use only” license for fab-lab hardware, while #hplusroadmap participants argue that only standard open-source licenses (GPL, MIT, etc.) can prevent fragmentation of the open-hardware commons and enable downstream extension.

- Hardware copyleft enforcement gap: U.S. law currently offers no mechanism analogous to the GPL that would compel redistribution of CAD files when physical objects are resold, leaving mechanical designs effectively public-domain once printed.

- MIT is offering mobile fab-lab grants to lower-48 communities; proposals must justify on-site deployment rather than requiring users to travel to MIT, aiming to democratize access to fabrication tools.

- Carbon-nanotube artificial-muscle demo: 1 V DC across CNT paper in salt water produces ~1 cm deflection and 15 Hz oscillation under square-wave drive, suggesting low-voltage actuator applications.

- Bench-top CNT synthesis recipe: 30 V/20 A arc between 0.5 mm copper electrodes in aqueous sucrose yields 7 mg min⁻¹ of ~20 % purity nanotubes; optimal yield reported with 90° electrode angle and ferrocene–nickelocene catalyst in xylene.

- Millisecond-pulsed laser irradiation of carbon-black suspensions at room temperature produces hydrophilic “carbon onions” with hollow cores and incomplete graphitic shells, offering a low-temperature synthesis route.

- Open-source tools highlighted: Ladyada’s USBtinyISP AVR programmer, cad.py, fablib, and MIT’s self-replicating fab wiki (scripts.mit.edu/~emu/fab) are cited as existing open hardware/software resources.

- Defense brainstorming: inflatable tefzel-film domes with embedded ball-bearing layers are proposed as low-cost blast shields for protecting fab labs or entire cities from missiles.

- Micro-fluidics prototyping: 0.2 µm channels (CD-stamper scale) and Scotch-tape micro-patterning techniques are discussed for ultra-small fluidic amplifiers and rapid prototyping.

- OpenCog accepted as a Google Summer of Code 2009 mentoring organization, offering stipends for open-source AGI development.