• Ray Kurzweil’s formal rebuttal to PZ Myers’ critique of whole-brain emulation timelines was circulated (kurzweilai.net link), reigniting debate over whether compressed genomic information is sufficient to bootstrap full brain simulation and how soon such emulation might be feasible.

• A draft DIYbio community letter to the U.S. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues was circulated; criticism centered on the draft ignoring prior PCSBI recommendations, with calls for a single, consensus-backed submission instead of fragmented individual letters.

• Participants modeled the economic impact of engineered biological attacks—designer pathogens or locust swarms targeting Chinese agriculture—highlighting the difficulty of attribution once agricultural collapse begins and the strategic incentives for state or non-state actors.

• Japanese transhumanist culture was explored, including the offer to share the Mixi community member list (ID 407114), the prevalence of Raelian affiliations, and the influence of anime such as Macross (inspired by James Hogan) and Neon Genesis Evangelion’s “Human Instrumentality Project,” with speculation on Aum Shinrikyo’s recruitment via the series.

• Technical CAD infrastructure discussions covered: Open-NURBS was evaluated for step.py but produced garbled NURBS-B-rep visualizations, prompting custom tessellation code; FreeCAD abandoned Open CASCADE’s AIS viewer for Coin3D (GPL/commercial) due to performance issues; PyOpenGL-Demo and PythonCAD were noted as minimal NURBS prototyping resources.

• The Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prize for an improved RepRap was advertised at $80 k (funding not yet secured) alongside a real $18 k side-prize already funded.

• DARPA META-II program preparations focused on licensing of generated outputs and whether performers are merely using SysML; participants considered submitting a competing proposal if SysML becomes the de-facto standard.

• The Open Hardware Summit (openhardwaresummit.org) was flagged as an upcoming event, while FAB6 conference videos (fablab.23video.com/channel/762537/fab6) were being uploaded, including DIYbio and “Greek logic” demos.