• The channel held a 10-person DIY-bio teleconference that launched a weekly “paper of the week” journal club; participants included researchers from RPI STS, Vanderbilt biolab, and multiple hackerspaces, with cluckj presenting 24/7 PCR microfluidics work and RPI faculty (Hess, Fortun, Campbell, Eglash) noted as active supporters of open STS/DIY-bio research.

• Practical nanotech design questions were debated: the feasibility of an atom-level API was questioned because chemistry is more complex than machining, and genehacker requested references for diamond mechanosynthesis tooltips—Perry Metzger recommended the Merkle-Freitas “Minimal Toolset” paper plus Maitland Jones’ organic-chemistry textbook, while warning that amateur wet-lab work with adamantanes is hazardous without professional safety infrastructure.

• A real-time network-debugging session dissected a stalled Ubuntu package download inside VirtualBox; tcpdump revealed 1380-byte TCP payloads with PUSH flags that later vanished, suggesting transient firewall/NAT interference with MTU discovery or window scaling, and Metzger walked the channel through reading raw packet traces as a transferable skill.

• Safety and regulatory constraints on DIY chemistry were highlighted: Derek Lowe’s “Things I Won’t Work With” blog series (pipeline.corante.com) was cited as cautionary reading, and participants noted increasing scrutiny on home chemists purchasing glassware, especially when handling compounds like chlorine trifluoride.

• Key open-access resources circulated include two Nature papers hosted on designfiles.org: “Spatiotemporal control of cell signalling using a light-switchable protein interaction” (optogenetic switch for precise cellular control) and “Intranasal delivery of cells to the brain” (non-invasive stem-cell administration route).

• Ultra-low-cost fabrication methods were shared: pmetzger described repeatedly snapping thin wires to create sharp AFM/scanning-probe tips (~50 % success rate) and linked the Wikipedia page on scanning-probe microscopy for detailed protocols.

• Community infrastructure links included graphene synthesis notes (http://heybryan.org/graphene.html), a molecular-manipulation video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyZ9bFl_qg), Freitas’ “ecophagy” paper estimating an 8–10-day lower bound for global grey-goo scenarios (http://www.rfreitas.com/Nano/Ecophagy.htm), RepRap build instructions (http://tweaklabs.org/RepRap), and thesprouts.org’s Django-based lab-management software for community biolabs.

• Educational and outreach partnerships were noted: CMOST (Children’s Museum of Science & Technology, Troy) offers homeschool programs, summer camps, and free planetarium shows built with Nightshade software, while John Smart announced the first master’s degree in Future Studies focused on emerging technologies and circulated his iPad-futures white paper (http://accelerating.org/downloads/SmartJ-2010-FutureoftheiPad.pdf).