- A thermodynamics paper with cross-referenced tables of “power required (kW)”, “process rate (kg/hr)” and “electricity required (J/kg)” for manufacturing processes was highlighted as a potential source of machine-readable metadata; the idea is to store unit strings that can be parsed by a GNU-units wrapper so that arbitrary process chains can be automatically stitched together and later validated for plausibility.  
- Discussion of self-replicating machine metrics: participants floated a simple web tool that would apply Freitas’ KSRM closure criteria (e.g., Tukey Ratio, mean average of parts addition) to user-supplied part lists, forcing designers to structure their data in a way that makes closure analysis trivial.  
- A 6-lb soft pneumatic “exoskeleton” (really an exo-muscle suit without rigid links) was shared from http://cwwang.com/2008/04/08/soft-pneumatic-exoskeleton/ as an example of lightweight, low-profile human augmentation hardware.  
- Cold-fusion news from PhysOrg (http://www.physorg.com/news157046734.html) was briefly noted as evidence that the field might be gaining credibility.  
- DIY genome sequencing was proposed as a community “lottery” run through the diybio network, with a tongue-in-cheek stretch goal of “$30, one-hour” personal sequencing tools.  
- A FastFEA speed-up claim was dissected: the banded structure of the giant coefficient matrices arising in finite-element PDE solvers was suggested as the source of the reported performance gain.  
- A 1.4 GB Perl script (originally 18 GB due to a scoping bug) was running in the background while the channel joked about memory footprint, illustrating the ad-hoc computational workflows common in the group.