- Utility-fog and its variants (hyperfog, utility sand) were re-examined as a 3-D swarm of femto-scale robots able to solidify air instantly to cushion high-speed impacts, illustrating ongoing interest in programmable matter for safety and construction.  
- A PopSci article on color-shifting contact lenses that report blood-glucose levels was highlighted as a working example of non-invasive metabolic monitoring, aligning with transhumanist health-tracking goals.  
- A technical debate over CAD resolution concluded that nanometer-scale base units (2^32 nm ≈ 4 m) are practical for open-source interchange, with run-time conversion preferred over fixed picometer grids to avoid 32-bit integer overflow.  
- Reverse-engineering of SolidWorks .sldprt files began: an 8 MB test corpus was uploaded and volunteers with SolidWorks 2010 were sought to validate geometry, aiming to liberate proprietary part data for open hardware.  
- MakerBot hardware improvements were discussed, including a redesigned 0.18 mm nozzle for higher-resolution FDM printing and the use of rotary optical encoders to reach 0.1 mm positioning accuracy.  
- Laser-cutter driver gaps were mapped: Epilog lacks open Linux support, while Chinese J-TEC models ship with user-space USB drivers; real-time kernel control (EMC2-style) was proposed for future integration.  
- NanoEngineer-1 (NE-1) was evaluated as an open-source CAD platform for DNA origami and nanoscale design; its atomic-level modeling could feed reusable parts into SKDB for macro-scale applications like kilometer-long solar roadways.  
- Installation hurdles for NE-1—missing PyQt4 binaries, obsolete Berkeley DB 4.5, and broken .deb dependencies—were documented, with community install scripts and Fedora .spec files shared to ease adoption.