• The U.S. Army launched a cash-prize program soliciting iPhone apps that could be useful to soldiers, signaling early military interest in consumer-grade mobile tech.  
• Eyebeam’s “Opening Hardware” event (17 Mar 2010) and the nascent Austin hackerspace were highlighted as key gatherings for open-manufacturing advocates, while the long-running “Confusion Research Center” proposal was dismissed as trolling.  
• Jason Kridner of BeagleBoard.org offered to contribute full design files and documentation to SKDB, the fledgling “apt-get for hardware” system that packages each design as a Git repo with metadata.yaml for dependencies and BOMs.  
• BeagleBoard power-management hacks were detailed: idle draw can fall below 100 mW, and with board mods to 8 mW while retaining RAM, making it feasible to run for “several hours” from a 2-AA USB phone-charger pack.  
• NASA’s WISE space telescope was expected to find ~1,000 brown-dwarf stars within 25 light-years, implying an average separation of only 4.5 ly and revising local stellar demographics.  
• Participants shared longevity research (“Systemic signals regulate ageing and rejuvenation of blood stem cell niches”) and debated a Telegraph claim about the first pediatric stem-cell transplant in the UK.  
• Extensive experimentation with personal information-management tools—TKDO, vimoutliner, emacs org-mode, ikiwiki, and Bryan’s “meetlog” with auto-generated tag clouds and topic recommendations—revealed up to 3–4 h/day overhead and a push for lightweight, automated logging.  
• Open-manufacturing resources circulated included the FOSDEM 2010 talk “Manufacturing for the Masses,” the new open-tech wiki thewiki4opentech.org, and calls to migrate BeagleBoard files from proprietary Allegro to open-source EDA like gEDA.