- Participants explored a “reprap for tissue engineering” concept, proposing low-cost additive manufacturing to print biodegradable scaffolds for lab-grown organs and tissues.  
- A Kickstarter campaign for a DIY Arduino EEG was criticized for duplicating the decade-old OpenEEG project, sparking debate on whether re-implementing open hardware adds value or merely fragments effort.  
- NASA Ames Director Pete Worden’s “Hundred-Year Starship” initiative was discussed—an audacious plan for a one-way Mars settlement by 2030—along with proposals to demonstrate in-situ resource utilization at Ames and build a California Mars-analog research center (marshome.org) with teleoperated robotic base-building and an iPhone simulation game.  
- The channel is designing “Piny,” an open-source, Git-backed alternative to Thingiverse/GitHub for open-hardware projects, emphasizing static-file hosting (git + ikiwiki + cgit) to avoid the scaling and privacy pitfalls of large social platforms.  
- Planned Piny features include per-repo RSS/activity feeds, one-click “fork” implemented as server-side git clone & push, zip-upload workflows, public/private repo ACLs, and metadata indexing via commit hooks that update static search indexes within ~60 s.  
- Development workflow pain points were catalogued: lack of regression tests, the need to rebuild Debian packages for every change, absence of a ready VM image for isolated testing, and opaque ikiwiki quirks such as its underlay mechanism and cgit’s inability to follow file renames.  
- Links and resources shared include RapCAD and OpenSCAD (with a new Python interpreter), the open-source revival of “Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space,” GitHub API docs, Gitorious self-hosting instructions, and the abandoned egitd daemon once used by GitHub.