- The ACS SciFinder database’s 5 000-record cap and anti-scraping license were criticized as a major barrier to open chemical informatics, while Reaxys was praised for offering XML exports and participants sought full access to mine reaction data (example ID 96669).  
- Open cheminformatics stacks were surveyed: SMILES/SMARTS/SMIRKS grammars, Daylight’s pydaylight, Frowns, Open Babel, and the Blue Obelisk suite were highlighted as community alternatives to proprietary databases.  
- CAS registered its 50 millionth chemical substance only nine months after the 40 millionth, underscoring the exponential growth of chemical knowledge and the urgency of open-data solutions.  
- SKDB’s CAD kernel migrated to OpenCASCADE’s Bnd_Box for robust 3-D bounding-box calculations, replacing an edge-based method that failed on curved bricks, although a new unit test now fails and a Lego round-brick mating test still hangs on interface-detection bugs.  
- Retrosynthesis planning code was judged hardware-agnostic and slated to live outside SKDB, while hardware-specific generators will be packaged within SKDB for downstream use.  
- A Miller Thunderbolt XL AC/DC welder arrived; immediate reliability upgrades—larger diodes on heatsinks and a thermostatic fan—were recommended, along with buying 50 lb welding-rod lots (~$125) by pitting suppliers against each other.  
- A Japanese paper showing higher-yield induced pluripotent stem cells from liposuction aspirates than from skin biopsies was circulated as a practical source for regenerative-medicine experiments.  
- SKDB tooling expanded with new Perl utilities (yaml2outline.pl, ysh.pl) and a Python converter (repo_to_yaml.py) that transforms XML part descriptions into YAML for parametric CAD workflows.  
- Nuclear-safety discourse referenced the federally mandated meltdown rate of once per million reactor-years, focusing on coolant-pump failure cascades, while Titan’s short-chain hydrocarbons were debated as a potential fuel limited by the moon’s thick-atmosphere heat sink.