• A 13 May 2010 Nature paper on “Molecular robots guided by prescriptive landscapes” was circulated as evidence that programmable nanoscale systems are moving from concept to laboratory reality.  
• Participants debated whether an independent outsider can realistically learn molecular biology today; they concluded that PCR, restriction digests, gel electrophoresis, and plasmid transformation remain unavoidable, equipment-heavy steps, with Protocol-online.org, Berkeley iTunes-U lectures, and a curated e-book tree (fennetic.net/irc/EBOOK.tree) offered as free learning resources.  
• The long-standing tension over BioBricks-style abstraction layers resurfaced: critics called them an artificial hack on evolved cellular networks, while supporters defended them as an engineering scaffold until better predictive models emerge.  
• MakerBot’s documented self-replication milestone (blog.makerbot.com/2010/06/04/a-makerbot-self-replicates) was celebrated as a concrete advance toward open-source hardware ecosystems capable of exponential growth.  
• Cloudfab.org (a web-based manufacturing broker) and SolidScape’s ink-jet wax printing were highlighted as emerging tools for rapid prototyping and microfluidics, while personalabs.com was cited as an example of consumer-accessible blood diagnostics.  
• The group framed “yak shaving” (recursive prerequisite tasks) as the dominant bottleneck in open hardware, contrasting software’s near-zero iteration latency with multi-week physical dependencies, and proposed a distributed “yak-trading” platform (tentatively yakherding.com) where users exchange micro-tasks and reputation credits to eliminate duplicated labor.  
• Concrete yak cascades were shared: a MechMate CNC repair required welding gear held by Greg, which needed Les’s permission, and an infrared HUD project ballooned into three months of RepRap building after a BeagleBoard failure—illustrating how proven subsystems (e.g., Gumstix + Micron MT9P401 camera) can short-circuit such chains.  
• Microsoft Research’s GEC language for “genetic engineering of living cells” was linked but dismissed as Windows/.NET-locked despite its SBML foundation, while VoxForge’s open-source speech corpus (~140 h) was promoted as a candidate for rapid Mechanical Turk expansion.  
• The NSF award search portal was recommended as a partial substitute for the missing global, publicly funded research-project directory that could seed Mechanical Turk micro-tasks, and OVP (open-source virtual platforms) was cited as an example of tooling that can shave entire classes of hardware yaks by moving development into simulation.