- The X-Prize $10 million purse was not pre-funded; it was insured years after launch and still required a multi-million-dollar premium, debunking a common funding myth.  
- Mobile bio-lab precedents include Mac Cowell’s 2008 “DIYbio-in-a-trailer,” a German postal-truck DNA lab, and the BioBus, all evaluated for field biology practicality.  
- Ethan Perlstein’s Princeton lab uses yeast as an evolutionary pharmacology model by dosing them with psychiatric drugs, creating a low-cost platform for drug mechanism studies.  
- An open-hardware spectrophotometer (openspectrometer.com) is under development; current bottlenecks are aligning concave holographic gratings and sourcing affordable UV-transparent optics for 260/280 nm DNA quantification.  
- In-vitro (“vat-grown”) meat is viewed as the most viable route to end factory farming, leveraging 3-D-printed vasculature and irradiated feedstock for sterility, while a counter-proposal for legless, brainless “bioreactor cows” was debated for using existing farm infrastructure.  
- Technical challenges for cultured meat include preventing biofilm and viral contamination, choosing defined media versus grass slurry, and understanding hormonal contributions in the absence of a CNS.  
- jrayhawk introduced gliadin, CXCR3, and zonulin as key proteins in gluten-related immune pathways, prompting plans for an interactive web tool mapping these to SNPs, 3-D structures, and PDB/Entrez datasets.  
- Paul Fernhout’s essay on post-scarcity economics (“technologies of abundance in the hands of scarcity thinkers”) was discussed, with kanzure noting Fernhout’s opposition to DIYbio over “world plague” fears.