- Peter Thiel’s “Breakthrough Philanthropy” dinner was documented on video (SingularityHub) and discussed in a Benetech blog post, highlighting his push for wealthy donors to fund radical science rather than incremental charity.  
- WikiLeaks cables were circulated that list “critical foreign dependencies,” giving the channel a snapshot of global infrastructure deemed vital to U.S. interests.  
- Jeri Ellsworth demonstrated a DIY backscatter-imaging “hand scanner” that mimics TSA body-scanning hardware, showing how hobbyists can replicate security tech.  
- Marcin Jakubowski posted a $2.4 M funding outline for the Global Village Construction Set—an open-source hardware toolkit to bootstrap resilient communities.  
- Halcyon Molecular, a gene-sequencing startup, was profiled in multiple interviews (NextBigFuture, FightAging.org, Maria Konovalenko’s blog) emphasizing ultra-low-cost, long-read DNA sequencing as a path to radical life extension.  
- Zombal.com was introduced as a Mechanical-Turk-like marketplace for science outsourcing, though participants judged it “alpha-quality” and “lame.”  
- Kinect was hacked at MIT into a Minority-Report-style gesture interface, illustrating rapid repurposing of consumer hardware for advanced HCI experiments.  
- NanoEngineer-1 simulation images of atomically precise gears and DNA structures were shared, along with a large explanatory poster, to ground molecular-manufacturing discussions in concrete CAD models.  
- A 1998 Drexler paper on “Pathways to Diamondoid Molecular Manufacturing” was re-circulated, prompting debate on tracking incremental progress toward atomically precise fabrication.