• A critique of Upverter accused the company of monetizing open-source hardware designs while keeping its own platform closed-source, sparking debate on venture-capital capture of open hardware ecosystems.  

• Participants dissected the fine print of Innocentive crowdsourcing challenges, noting that solvers grant seekers a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive license—retaining IP ownership but effectively giving away commercial rights.  

• Technical discussion detailed how visible PDF watermarks can be removed by excising the corresponding PDF object, whereas hidden watermarks embedded in FlateDecode streams require zlib decompression and deeper reverse-engineering; tools such as pdftk, pdfminer, and pypdf were referenced, with sample files hosted at diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2.  

• The Singularity University Launchpad program (singularityu.org/launchpad) was highlighted as a funding and mentorship opportunity for transhumanist and hard-tech startups.  

• A proposal to use cultured retinal patches as subcutaneous sensory I/O devices—fed by low-power lasers or nerve-growth-factor stimulation—was countered with the argument that the tongue already offers a proven, non-invasive input channel for sensory substitution.  

• The 2011 New York Times coverage of Sam Deadwyler’s hippocampal memory-prosthesis experiments was revisited: a skull-mounted array implementing Ted Berger’s algorithms restored memory encoding in rats, suggesting that simple diodes could replace more invasive retinal grafts.  

• Practical biotech hardware distinctions were clarified: FPLC (Fast Protein Liquid Chromatography) is the preparative, large-volume counterpart to analytical HPLC and is standard for industrial protein purification workflows.  

• A DIY experimental strategy was outlined—bypassing formal coursework by reading current literature and attempting direct replication of published protocols—as a faster route to original research, while participants debated whether a PhD is necessary for meaningful work in regenerative medicine or genomics.  

• An insider detail from Pacific Biosciences revealed that their single-molecule real-time sequencers run on C# software, and the senior product-development manager co-authored the foundational 2009 Science paper “Real-time DNA sequencing from single polymerase molecules.”