• George Church’s Polonator DNA-sequencing platform is fully open-source; its control software (Python, Linux) is downloadable from http://arep.med.harvard.edu/Polonator/soft.html and is designed to run on commodity dual-core PCs with 3 TB of storage, using fluorescence-tagged chemistry and dual-channel flow-cells for parallel runs.

• At the International Conference on Systems Biology, CellDesigner tutorials showed how to model protein-catalyzed reactions, cellular compartments, and complexes, while early Biopython code for synthetic-biology workflows was demoed at http://code.google.com/p/pysynthbio/.

• The SKDB open-source hardware knowledge base is being restructured: contributors criticized Make magazine’s “ultimate tool-buying guide” YAML as subjective, proposed activity-based tool requirements, and discussed integrating public-domain patent diagrams to improve coverage.

• genehacker is reverse-engineering a DRM-locked digital textbook, having identified its encrypted container and a patent describing layered public-key encryption, and is exploring methods to observe or break the decryption process.

• Additional open-source resources circulated include CAD files for electric-vehicle motor adapter plates (rowetel.com), RepRap photos from the Ann Arbor Maker Faire (Flickr set), and the Given Imaging capsule endoscopy platform.