- A French/German TV segment on Arte tracks Ray Kurzweil and biohackers, highlighting tension between Kurzweil’s mainstream transhumanism and DIY biohacker culture.  
- Bruce Perens proposes an open-hardware licensing model that uses trademark law and a membership “contract co-op”; members must release full design files and can lose trademark rights if they violate rules.  
- Discussion contrasts this trademark approach with GPL-style copyleft and the existing OHANDA trademark scheme, questioning whether trademark can ever substitute for patent leverage.  
- Fenn experiments with GPL-licensed hyperbolic-geometry VR code from geometrygames.org, aiming to add Linux joystick support and build a virtual-reality environment.  
- RepRap extrusion modeling is noted as an unsolved problem involving non-Newtonian flow, thermal stress, and repeatable but poorly understood physical processes; no comprehensive simulations yet exist.  
- DIY pharmacology thread covers ethanol extraction of phosphatidylcholine from lecithin, inositol’s role in serotonin modulation, and the absence of a psychopharmaceutical drug-interaction simulator.  
- Typing-speed benchmarking shows wide variance (75–150 wpm) across gtypist, typespeed, and typeracer, underscoring the lack of a de-facto standard test.  
- Neutrino FTL result from CERN/OPERA is mentioned but not deeply analyzed; participants emphasize need for replication and lament popular overreaction.  
- PythonOCC (OpenCASCADE bindings) is now hosted on GitHub, marking a move from Subversion to distributed version control for open-source CAD work.