- A $1,500 portable 3-D printer from Chinese firm pp3dp.com was presented as a MakerBot competitor, with sample objects already available on Thingiverse, underscoring the rapid commoditization of desktop fabrication.  
- CollabRx’s founder argued on Singularity Hub that small-scale open-science efforts can’t match the impact of big-instrument science like Hubble, sparking channel pushback that citizen science can still yield meaningful, distributed breakthroughs.  
- Melanie Swan’s OSCON 2010 talk “DIY Genomics: An Open Platform for Citizen Science” (posted on YouTube) was circulated as a key reference for community genomics initiatives.  
- A U.S. House hearing on mandating open-access publication of federally funded research was flagged via ScienceInsider, highlighting legislative momentum toward universal public access to taxpayer-funded results.  
- Richard Stallman’s Reddit AMA urged more open-source CAD development; participants countered that professional-grade tools like Pro/ENGINEER remain preferable to AutoCAD for serious hardware work.  
- TechCrunch’s “death-hacking” article was criticized for claiming that radical life-extension beliefs will make people procrastinate on health, prompting debate about psychological effects of longevity optimism.  
- QuantumG proposed 3-D-printable plastic shells that snap onto LEGO bricks to give mechanical prototypes a finished appearance, while also sharing a free robotic-arm image (http://quantumg.net/cmrobot.jpg) as open hardware inspiration.  
- genehacker demonstrated that reCAPTCHA’s audio fallback can be bypassed by typing ten random words after listening, exposing an immediate spam-account vulnerability for any service relying on that fallback.  
- A university robotics club acquired four surplus educational robotic arms for free and brainstormed converting them into teleoperation rigs, automated drink dispensers, or precision soldering stations.  
- Discussion of Dan Barry’s Singularity University talk on robotics ethics centered on audience outrage over the “kick the Big Dog” demo, with QuantumG arguing that anthropomorphic empathy for machines is misplaced and that kicking a robot is ethically equivalent to kicking a tractor.