- Manros Therapeutics, a bankrupt French biotech, is liquidating professional-grade lab equipment and reagents at steep discounts, creating a rare procurement opportunity for DIYbio practitioners.  
- The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s “Breakthroughs to Cures” report explicitly recommends launching a micro-grants platform dedicated to citizen-science and DIYbio projects, offering a concrete funding model for open biology.  
- A schism on the RepRap developer mailing list pits contributors who withhold hardware designs for profit against those who insist that full openness is essential for community progress.  
- Practical taser countermeasures were evaluated: dense conductive clothing plus isolation layers work, while capacitors or “belly caps” do not; the thread also raised ethical objections to unauthorized animal experimentation.  
- Participants circulated a Nature News article on web-browsing effects on brain activity, then called for an IRC bot (pyscholar) that could automatically retrieve and share pay-walled academic papers on demand.  
- Sensory-augmentation concepts included implantable GPS for native spatial awareness and LED-array contact lenses for HUDs, alongside discussion of non-classical senses such as acceleration and temperature.  
- Kanzure’s SKDB project released an early YAML package-specification file (package_spec.yaml) intended to standardize open-hardware metadata, dependencies, and build instructions; volunteers were recruited to convert it into user-friendly HTML/PDF docs.  
- Google’s Chrome OS notebook pilot program drew applications from members who emphasized their open-source and transhumanist credentials in their essays to improve selection odds.