- Elsevier quietly granted unrestricted text-mining rights to at least one researcher, sparking debate over whether paywalled publishers will now monetize meta-science on their own content.  
- A live chemoinformatics parser (http://stark-fire-6273.herokuapp.com/) was deployed on Heroku, accepting plain-language chemical names and returning structured data; early users stress-tested it with inputs ranging from “water” to “penis.”  
- Addgene (non-profit plasmid repository) and Petridish.org (Kickstarter clone for science projects) were highlighted as emerging open-science infrastructure; Petridish’s founder was noted to be “depressed” on Hacker News.  
- Science Commons was reported to have indexed 38 million papers in its ScientificCommons.org database, separate from the JSTOR torrent liberated by Aaron Swartz.  
- DIY biology discussion included the acquisition of an EcoRI restriction/methylation (r/m) plasmid and practical advice on electrophoresis power supplies (300–500 V range).  
- Stephen Wolfram’s personal-analytics blog post inspired channel members to consider logging call start times in addition to duration for richer life-tracking datasets.  
- Free wall-chart bonanza: Stem Cell Technologies offered large-format pluripotent-stem-cell reference posters, with users ordering multiple charts via a multi-select form.  
- A $20 USB pen-style 500× microscope/endoscope (Supereyes B002) was linked as a candidate for building a distributed “microbe network” of webcam-connected microscopes.  
- Wired coverage of Quantic Dream’s “Kara” demo (real-time android sentience short film) triggered excitement about near-term photorealistic AI characters and their ethical implications.