- A 10-year-old reportedly produced homemade aerogels, prompting discussion about the likely involvement of a parent with technical expertise.  
- The MIT BioBricks Parts Registry (partsregistry.org) was highlighted as a key open-source resource for synthetic biology; kanzure offered a local mirror.  
- kanzure released “pyscholar,” a Python tool that scrapes and parses academic search-result pages from IEEE Xplore, Nature, PLOS ONE, PubMed Central, PubMed, ScienceDirect, and SpringerLink using XPath expressions.  
- drazak outlined two upcoming research proposals: (1) culturing rat mesentery endothelial cells and (2) designing a microfluidic DNA synthesizer, possibly to be built by the Kepler microfluidics group.  
- kanzure shared large paper collections on DNA synthesis chemistry (phosphoramidites) and a 2 GB backup of research PDFs via FTP links.  
- Participants debated efficient file-transfer methods for large datasets, comparing scp, sftp, netcat, udpcast, NFS, and BitTorrent.  
- genehacker_light explored tone-detection circuits for a “steam-powered mechanical soldier” project, eventually settling on a compressed-air variant of Tyndall’s sensitive flame.  
- kanzure discovered and recommended the Firefox extension “Solvent” (and later “Xpather”) for interactively generating XPath strings to aid web-scraping development.  
- OpenCogBuntu, an Ubuntu-based distribution for OpenCog AI development, was mentioned as a potentially useful environment for cognitive-architecture work.