- A new user, antipragmatist, announced plans to build a “greatly simplified” scanning-tunneling microscope (STM) for personal nanotech work, adding an isolation system and laser-interferometry feedback for computer control.  
- kanzure shared a large archive of nanotech papers (http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/nanotech/) and advised the newcomer to “read the papers, run the simulations, build a laboratory” rather than rely on popular summaries.  
- fenn and kanzure discussed Innocentive’s open-innovation bounties, including a $15 k prize for isolating human interleukin-25 and a $30 k prize for an R-package that predicts outcomes from 7 400-gene expression data sets.  
- kanzure and klafka1 are actively developing http://www.drugstack.com, a price-comparison site for nootropics; they debated scraping strategies for vendor prices and for structured drug data from Wikipedia infoboxes, PubChem XML, and MeSH.  
- fenn advocated a clean, Octopart-style interface over “bullshit ecommerce themes” and questioned whether Innocentive actually pays winners, while kanzure suggested ScienceExchange.com as an alternative marketplace for paid lab tasks.  
- The channel’s topic bar lists key resources: the SKDB hardware-design wiki (http://gnusha.org/skdb/), the diybio Google Group, the Gada Prize for open-source robotics, and public IRC logs.