• DARPA’s “vehicleforge.mil” program is soliciting proposals for an open-source, Thingiverse-like platform for crowdsourced military-vehicle design; the channel is actively dissecting the draft BAA, META-2 language requirements, and the practical hurdles of federal overhead, ITAR, and WAWF/i-Edison compliance.

• The core technical challenge is to create a component library that integrates with META-2 tools for architecture synthesis; participants propose letting users upload STEP/IGES parts, attach metadata and equations, and note that the existing META-2 papers lack a real library and are judged inferior to open-source projects like GraphSynth.

• US SOCOM is already field-testing eight “Mobile Technology Complex” (MTC) units in Afghanistan—mobile fabrication labs built around CNC mills, CAD libraries, and an upcoming metal-powder 3-D printer—illustrating a parallel push toward distributed, on-demand manufacturing of mission-critical hardware.

• A debate over strategy emerges: whether to bid on vehicleforge.mil as a small agile team, as a university consortium, or as a subcontractor to a defense prime; veterans with prior DARPA experience recommend staying small and letting the prime absorb contracting complexity.

• Ray Kurzweil’s claim that the genome alone explains the brain is criticized by biologists (P.Z. Myers et al.), sparking cross-platform discussion on Slashdot and ScienceBlogs and prompting channel jokes about “Kurzweil-bashing” becoming an Olympic sport.

• Humanity+ board elections are mired in controversy over slate diversity; one member posts a live vote-tracking script and considers withdrawing, while others question the organization’s relevance.

• RepRap’s next version is officially named “Huxley,” continuing the tradition of science-fiction-author codenames, and DIYbio.org quietly relaunches its website.

• Practical tooling tips circulate: using Google Docs to collaboratively annotate BAAs, leveraging grep -P for non-greedy Perl regexes, and recovering from a segfaulted bash session on personal servers.