- UFO sightings were reframed as deliberate “flea-circus” spectacles staged by post-organic intelligences—advanced enough for interstellar travel yet curiously unable to stop shining bright lights at humans.  
- A revival effort for the open-source molecular-design package NanoEngineer-1 is under way, tackling decade-old code by porting it from Ubuntu 7 → 8 → 9, fixing PyQt/PyOpenGL API drift, and adapting to macOS’s shift from GCC to Clang; progress is tracked at http://diyhpl.us/cgit/nanoengineer-theirix and https://github.com/nmz787/nanoengineer/commits/ubuntu-fixes.  
- Upcoming neuro-engineering gatherings were announced: the 4th International Conference on Neuroprosthetic Devices (Freiburg, 19–20 Nov), IEEE EMBC 2012 (San Diego, 28 Aug–1 Sep), and Neural Interfaces Conference 2012 (abstract deadline 18 May).  
- NIH issued RFI NOT-GM-12-108 soliciting community input on outsourcing wet-lab procedures, flagged as a strategic opportunity for DIYbio and open-science groups.  
- A cost-comparison of journal access cited Harvard spending ~1 % of its budget on subscriptions while Indian institutes pay 5–10 %, with publishers like Springer demanding ~$100 k per new IIT and Elsevier defending “sustainability” as “sustaining publisher profits.”  
- Participants explored designing a one-handed programming language and IDE, debating whether to require chording keyboards or invent new input schemes for half-keyboard use, while a parallel project showcased a Monome-grid MIDI/OSC sequencer as an example of niche hardware driving software design.