- Protein-engineering reading list: kanzure posted links to three major handbooks—Protein Engineering Handbook (2-volume set), Protein Engineering Protocols (Methods in Molecular Biology), and Protein Engineering and Design—positioning them as core references for open-source bioengineering work.  
- Thought-identification research: Mathnerd314 asked for recent advances in decoding/identifying thoughts; chris_99 supplied a 2012 BBC article on UC Berkeley fMRI experiments that reconstruct visual images from brain activity.  
- Affinity-tag purification question: kanzure queried yashgaroth about whether their lab uses custom affinity tags during protein purification, a practical detail relevant to DIY protein production.  
- Search-query data mining: yottabit sought large corpora of real search queries beginning with interrogatives (who, what, where, when, why, how) to train or test search engines; kanzure offered a partial Google-Suggest dataset, while uniqanomaly pointed to Google Books N-grams as an alternative (albeit book-derived) source.  
- Space-exploration timeline roundup (off-topic but noted): yottabit summarized national and commercial Moon/Mars plans—Japan (Moon base by 2020), Russia (2030), SpaceX (crewed Mars ~2020), China (crewed lunar ~2025)—before redirecting further discussion to #space.