- Organovo’s 3-D organ printing project was highlighted via a Singularity Hub article (http://singularityhub.com/2009/06/15/organovo-pioneers-3-d-organ-printing/), with skepticism expressed that even printing a single blood vessel has not yet been achieved despite the hype.

- ybit announced a new position at Wellmax.com starting 28 Dec 2009 and mentioned he will now be able to build Windows .exe and Mac .dmg packages because he finally has hardware powerful enough to run Windows in VirtualBox.

- kanzure requested a “gene sensor” for a future wearable device that could non-invasively sample skin flakes or hair and report the genomes of people who have passed through an area, prompting discussion about microfluidic continuous PCR as a possible implementation route.

- fenn discovered a previously unknown aunt who is a UC Berkeley bioinformatics professor specializing in hidden Markov models for remote homology detection, multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetics, and active-site prediction, sparking thoughts of networking or relocation.

- kanzure solicited help writing concise, beginner-friendly technical documentation for SKDB (open-source hardware package system) before a Monday paper deadline, asking for outlines and syntax-highlighted examples to lower the barrier to entry.

- genehacker shared a Thingiverse link to an open-source 3-D printable object (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1425) illustrating the community’s ongoing interest in distributed digital manufacturing.

- Discussion of persistent IRC logging solutions included Quassel vs. Jabber transports, screen/irssi/bitlbee combos, and UTF-8 encoding issues when relaying Cyrillic text, reflecting the group’s tooling concerns for long-term knowledge capture.

- Redeemer, newly equipped with Python on an aging IBM ThinkPad 390X, was encouraged to install Ubuntu via ShipIt or a local mentor’s disc, highlighting the channel’s push toward open-source development environments.