• A 2008 Oxford Future of Humanity Institute report (http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/reports/2008-3.pdf) was cited as a more rigorous forecast than Kurzweil’s, projecting a 2040–2060 technological singularity and possible human obsolescence by 2070 if transhumanist progress stalls.

• Participants explored multiple routes for DIY spider-silk production, concluding that intact 300–350 kDa dragline proteins (MaSp1/2) cannot be expressed in E. coli or yeast without truncation; insect-cell baculovirus (SF9/SF21) or human-cell systems were identified as the only viable hosts, with Houston-based members offering live Nephila clavipes spiders, SF9 cells, and Bac-to-Bac reagents to jump-start open-source projects.

• A community-driven diamond-CVD initiative aims to build an open-source reactor for single-crystal diamond wafers to disrupt the semiconductor market; key challenges include 5–15 kW microwave plasma hardware, high-vacuum chambers, isotopically pure carbon feedstock, and n-type/p-type doping, with Fraunhofer Institute’s “metal easter-egg” chambers cited as the state-of-the-art benchmark.

• An open “science liberation front” was proposed to scrape and mirror pay-walled literature in real time; Wiley paywalls were bypassed live in chat, and participants curated open-access resources such as kanzure’s DIY archive (http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/) and a new microfluidics wiki (http://diyhpl.us/wiki/projects/microfluidics.txt).

• Patent-law reform ideas circulated, including taxing patents as property, banning sales to trolls, and creating defensive-only patent pools for open-source biotech, motivated by cases where IP restrictions block hobbyist aerogel synthesis and require “patent infringement insurance” for non-commercial DIY work.

• Electrospinning and microfluidic spinning were highlighted as the most promising lab-scale methods to replicate spider-silk fiber alignment once full-length spidroins are produced, with pH-controlled spinning baths mimicking the spider’s gland environment to improve tensile strength toward the 1000 MPa of natural N. clavipes silk.

• Participants sourced ultra-low-cost lab hardware via Alibaba, AliExpress, and Taobao, reporting success with micropipettes and RTL-SDR dongles, and shared practical fabrication tips such as stepper-motor resonance fixes for DIY syringe pumps and the use of tangential-flow filtration to concentrate recombinant silk proteins.

• A Houston DIYbio lab (“arclab,” formerly TX/RX Labs) was recommended as a local hub for spider-silk and other bio-projects, while Notre Dame’s transgenic silkworms, plant-based expression systems, and goat-milk silk production were critiqued for yield and purity limitations.

• The newly discovered Darwin’s bark spider (Caerostris darwini) was noted for dragline silk three times stronger than any other spider silk and ten times stronger than Kevlar, prompting plans to obtain Amazon specimens for gene sequencing to access superior spidroin genes.

• Polyphasic sleep (Uberman schedule) was discussed anecdotally, with members reporting 7-month personal trials and referencing WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s one-year experiment, framed as a productivity vs. sustainability trade-off alongside critiques of mainstream education and alternative schooling models.