- augur reverse-engineered the old KurzweilAI Brain mind-map, extracted its proprietary .jbc database, rewrote the loader in Ruby, and released a static HTML mirror at http://wellnowwhat.net/brain_archive/ that lets users browse the semantic network without Java.

- kanzure proposed an open-source “instruction generator” that would accept a goal plus an inventory/tools database, search for a valid action sequence, and render it into natural-language instructions, prompting debate on the best internal data structure to feed an NL generator.

- Participants revived open-source TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) work, sharing links to the archived OpenStim and open-rtms.sf.net repositories and a local paper cache at http://heybryan.org/~bbishop/docs/open-rtms/.

- A low-cost, networked DIY incubator design was debated: whether to embed a $50 Seagate Dockstar running OpenWrt for Ethernet connectivity or keep a simpler USB-attached Linux host, weighing extensibility against cost and complexity.

- Spyder (http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~sjdv1982/spyder-framework/spyder-blender/) and related BlenderNation threads were highlighted as experimental Python frameworks for keeping CAD objects parametric inside Blender before baking them into meshes.

- kanzure’s early SKDB effort was introduced, packaging Thingiverse 3-D-printable objects into apt-get-style installable packages; kristianpaul volunteered to test them on a MakerBot Cupcake.

- George Whitesides’ “Diagnostics For All” initiative was noted as commercializing paper microfluidics under exclusive Harvard license, with discussion of adding cellphone-camera image analysis for low-resource diagnostics and concerns about lighting control and tamper-resistant camera-based results.

- genehacker asked whether a 4 cm-square, low-power microfluidic “Z80-level” computer would have any practical use, sparking brief speculation on large-area, low-speed fluidic logic.