- Five classes of synthetic-blood substitutes—perfluorocarbon emulsions, hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers, and three others—were reviewed via a Popular Mechanics article, highlighting near-term transfusion alternatives.  
- Participants debated whether political or religious objections to embryonic stem-cell research could delay radical life-extension; induced-pluripotent stem (iPS) cells were presented as a technically sufficient and ethically less contentious path, supported by a curated paper repository at http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/stem-cells/.  
- The Budapest FabLab, Hackerspace Budapest, and Asimov Foundation announced the “Open Science Lab” initiative, aiming to give citizen scientists affordable access to wet-lab facilities and equipment.  
- A user described a multi-day migraine that abolished conscious tactile perception yet improved fine-motor performance (phone unlocking, knife throwing), suggesting conscious interference may hinder low-level motor routines—proposed as a case study for consciousness-motor interaction.  
- Participants floated “drugstack.com,” a community-curated, evidence-based repository for supplement and nootropic stacks designed to counteract affiliate-link marketing by figures like Tim Ferriss.  
- The PNAS paper “Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin” (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012) was shared as a PDF, underscoring David Nutt’s role in psychedelic neuroimaging research.  
- A concept sketch for an autonomous tile-laying construction robot illustrated ongoing interest in automating physical labor through open-hardware robotics.