- Slime-mould-based optimization: A Technoccult article (re-posted by ybit) describes how the growth patterns of Physarum polycephalum were used to generate efficient layouts for Tokyo’s railway network, highlighting biological computing as a design tool.  
- UT-Austin Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition: kanzure linked the open-source code repository (Google Code project “ut-austin-igvc”) for the university’s autonomous vehicle entry, illustrating early open-hardware robotics efforts.  
- Emacs Org-mode advocacy: Utopiah reminded the channel of Org-mode (orgmode.org) as a comprehensive Emacs environment for note-taking, project planning, and authoring—positioned as a productivity backbone for research workflows.  
- AIAA paper request: QuantumG sought the 2001 paper “Human space exploration in ‘Earth’s neighborhood’ – Strategy and architectural approach” by B. K. Joosten; community members discussed using the shared designfiles.org archive and the papers mailing list to obtain restricted aerospace literature.  
- Camp ShopBot discussion: JayDugger canceled attendance for financial reasons; fenn reported that last year’s CNC workshop was entertaining but that equivalent knowledge is available on CNCzone forums, underscoring the value of online maker communities.  
- Personal compute cluster: ybit noted a home setup totaling ~5 GHz aggregate CPU, ~3.3 GB RAM, and 1.278 TB storage, with plans to install Gentoo and leverage distcc for distributed compilation—an example of hobbyist high-performance computing.  
- Elective-substrate behaviors: flamt shared a tarball (ansistego.sf.net/critterdrug-use-32-32.telepaths-profile-for-fire-anim-with-critters.tar.gz) described as containing “elective substrate behaviours,” hinting at experimental AI or ALife code, though no further technical details were unpacked.