- Cochlear implants now ship with a standard 3.5 mm line-in jack, making everyday cyborgs who pipe music or comms directly into their auditory nerve a present reality.  
- Channel members dissected whether the “cocktail-party effect” (selective auditory attention) is performed by the auditory cortex or could be off-loaded to hearing-aid DSP; consensus leaned toward cortex-level processing if the implant delivers sufficiently high-fidelity spike trains.  
- Current cochlear devices still underperform the biological cochlea because they stimulate single neurons instead of neural populations and cannot replicate the cochlea’s mechanical frequency analysis and active hair-cell damping; a 2000 PNAS paper on hair-cell transducer adaptation and electrically evoked otoacoustic emissions were cited as background.  
- A survey of open-source CNC projects (MIT MTM, BuildYourCNC, Jorge Barrera’s ~$20 k mill) concluded that none are fully open-source or self-replicating; participants suggested gearing-down leadscrews and diagonal part placement as ways to bootstrap higher accuracy in self-replicating machines.  
- Octopart’s new parametric search (web UI + REST API) exposes dozens of electrical parameters (dropout_voltage, forward_voltage, load_capacitance, etc.), but data quality suffers from keyword matching instead of taxonomic classification; a crowdsourced Mechanical-Turk cleanup at $1/page was floated and then rejected by Octopart.  
- SparkFun’s annual “Free Day” ($100 of parts per address until a $100 k pool is gone) prompted plans for an automated scraper/bot to maximize the haul, with RFID readers, GPS receivers, and IMUs topping the wish-list.