- Jeff Greason’s TEDxSanJoseCA talk “Making Space Pay and Having Fun Doing It” was shared via YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8PlzDgFQMM) and praised by participants for its content on commercial spaceflight economics.  
- Elon Musk’s claim that he will “put a man on Mars in 10 years” was highlighted in a blog post (http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2011/04/elon-musk-ill-put-a-man-on-mars-in-10-years/).  
- Discussion of micro-titer plate liquid-handling limits: standard 96-well plates accept 100–200 µL per well, with 2 µL the practical lower bound for repeatable manual pipetting; sub-microliter volumes require specialized plates and hardware.  
- A hardware-design question arose about specifying stepper-motor torque and spindle resolution for a DIY liquid-handling robot targeting 1 µL dispensing accuracy.  
- The open-source Boole-1.1 constructive-solid-geometry (CSG) library was dissected: participants debated whether to refactor its poorly-commented, non-commercial-licensed C code or re-implement the algorithm de-novo in a cleaner, testable form.  
- Free/libre CAD options were compared: FreeCAD, HeeksCAD (both OpenCASCADE-based), and OpenSCAD were discussed, with HeeksCAD noted as more feature-complete but lacking Mac binaries.  
- Self-replicating manufacturing concepts were explored, including MetalicaRap (an electron-beam powder-bed metal printer on RepRap wiki) and visions of ISRU-driven auxon systems that refine raw dirt into machines via solar furnaces.  
- The RepRap documentation effort was framed as a practical near-term goal, with encouragement to bootstrap via a simple wooden “repstrap” before tackling fully self-replicating designs.