• Nature Publishing Group released 20 million RDF triples of 1869–2012 article metadata under CC0, providing a SPARQL endpoint at http://data.nature.com with a 5,000-query/day non-commercial limit, creating an open corpus for text-mining and meta-analysis.  
• A DIY microfluidic DNA oligo-synthesis platform is being prototyped that will first use on-chip phosphoramidite chemistry and later switch to a ligation-based scheme that concatenates 6-mer oligos stored in water-in-oil droplet libraries; the team is debating laser-cutting the chips in-house (sub-$15 k, 1 µm resolution) versus external foundries ($250–160 k per iteration).  
• Participants are building a low-cost head-mounted AR display using aspheric lenses and surplus iPhone “retina” LCDs ($15) or PSP panels ($20) driven by a Galaxy S2, with laser-cut acrylic and 3-D-printed shells prototyped at a local hackspace.  
• Home semiconductor fabrication efforts include azonenberg’s vacuum sputtering chamber, nmz787’s 20 µm-resolution contact-lithography “Nyan-cat” chip, and a spin-coater project at RPI that will release BSD-licensed CAD and BOM for fume-hood-compatible CMOS work.  
• A Brazilian paper on “in-vitro transcription and translation inside a coconut” was circulated (doi archived at diyhpl.us), prompting plans to test GFP plasmids as a field-deployable bioreactor during an upcoming India trip.  
• The channel curated large open-access paper collections: diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/nanotech/ for nanotechnology, diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bio/ for biology, and recovered NanoEngineer-1 source code (cgit/nanoengineer) for molecular machine design.  
• Lucid-dreaming hardware discussion compared the Kickstarter “Remee” LED mask ($80) with older eye-movement-based REM interfaces, speculating on bidirectional dream-to-computer control.  
• Practical freelancing advice emphasized securing paid contracts and retainers before quitting day jobs, while technical workflow tips included using RVM for Ruby, avoiding Gmail for scientific note-taking, and leveraging university transcript policies despite unpaid loans.