• IBM researchers demonstrated a non-lithographic route to future computer chips by using DNA origami as a 3-D scaffold to position carbon nanotubes and nanoparticles into functional transistor networks, as reported in a Nature Nanotechnology paper.

• Channel participants debated the practical and philosophical distinctions between “open source” and “free software,” focusing on BSD-style permissive licensing versus GPL copyleft, the risk of tivoization, and Stallman’s moral framing of user freedoms.

• A distributed mirror network for open-access scientific literature was proposed, with candidate hosts (kanzure, ybit, Ted Smith, Eugen Leitl) and seed collections (bio.cc, superkuh’s library, eugen.leitl.org) identified to preserve and share research.

• DIY magnetic-tape storage was compared to bulk HDD deals (1.5 TB, 32 MB cache, $120) and Intel SSD pricing for personal data archiving, with current cartridges topping out at ~1 TB uncompressed.

• The open-source CAD/assembly project SKDB is debugging recursive coordinate-frame multiplication in OpenCASCADE, while also considering modifications to skdb.load_package for automatic metadata and data loading.

• A practical protocol for DIY mouse anesthesia was shared, involving freshly-mixed Avertin (2.5 % tribromo-ethanol in saline, pH >5, stored at 4 °C) plus CO₂ narcosis, with warnings about toxic degradation products.

• Critterding, an evolutionary-simulation “toy” written by a channel participant, was demonstrated, with the author currently fixing body-part intersection bugs to evolve more interesting agent behaviors.

• Participants discussed building a reusable, community-driven scraping interface to handle JavaScript-heavy sites, noting that WWW::Mechanize cannot execute JavaScript and tools like HtmlUnit or manual XMLHttpRequest replay are required.