- Eri Gentry’s interview about BioCurious and OSCON 2011 was shared (YouTube link), highlighting the growing visibility of community biology labs.  
- Participants debated the publicity-to-substance ratio of certain biohacker figures, with one member expressing frustration that “someone gained so much publicity for doing so little.”  
- Halcyon Molecular’s DNA-stretching technique was discussed; while surface-tension-based stretching was noted as well-understood, the company’s broader “sequence everything → live forever” strategy was critiqued as physics-heavy and biologically under-developed.  
- A link to Levine’s paper “Against Intellectual Monopoly” (dklevine.com) sparked a brief exchange on the economic and libertarian arguments against patents and copyrights.  
- Twilio’s new JavaScript client SDK (twilio.com/docs/client/twilio-js) was flagged as a potentially useful tool for rapid telephony integration.  
- A practical tip circulated on using Gmail as a large-scale research database via IMAP scraping (labnol.org guide).  
- The need for a standardized, machine-readable output format for command-line programs was raised, with a half-baked proposal blogged by rwmj.  
- NASA’s “Survey of In-Situ Resource Utilization for Lunar Colonization” presentation (LPI PDF) was linked for those interested in off-world self-sufficiency technologies.  
- Thrust, a CUDA-accelerated C++ parallel algorithms library (code.google.com/p/thrust), was recommended for high-performance computing tasks.  
- Ongoing sysadmin troubleshooting covered cron permission quirks, SSH key requirements for automated SCP backups, and the limitations of su inside shell scripts.