- A microfluidic droplet printer capable of depositing 1 million 25-µm droplets in 15 minutes is being designed; the motion system must sustain 342 kHz step pulses when 1/16-micro-stepping a 40-TPI leadscrew at 3 000 mm/min, and practical tests show Pololu A4988 drivers overheat unless heatsinks and forced-air cooling are added.  
- Porting the 3 572-line open-source GRBL G-code interpreter to the 8-core Parallax Propeller is under active discussion; a minimal subset interpreter could be written in Spin or C, and progress is tracked in the public repo laser_etcher.git and wiki at http://diyhpl.us/laser_etcher/laser_etcher/?updated#index5h1.  
- A Philadelphia father-daughter team just built an OpenPCR kit and are seeking low-cost primers for citizen-science snake sex-typing PCR; recommended sources include IDT at $0.15 / bp and periodic free-PCR-master-mix promotions, with community-college lab courses suggested for technique training.  
- The FBI’s “mobile biothreat” Android app (org.fas.mobilebiothreat) has been scraped and mirrored offline at diyhpl.us, giving DIY biologists portable access to the agency’s suspicious-substance identification cards.  
- Participants debated the merits of private vs. public R&D funding, citing oil-industry consortia that privately finance yet openly publish non-patentable research as a model more robust than public funding, and warning that perverse incentives (e.g., German/UK solar-feed-in-tariff fraud with arc-lamps at night) can undermine government programs.  
- DIY production of recombinant enzymes for orphan diseases such as Gaucher, Trimethylaminuria, and medium-chain fatty-acid oxidation disorders was proposed; ignoring patents could cut costs ~1000× versus commercial Cerezyme, and oral delivery via plant cells (Protalix ELELYSO) or engineered gut bacteria is being explored.  
- Whole-exome sequencing has fallen to roughly US $1 k–$5 k plus ~US $1 k analysis, making parent-driven, open-source development of personalized therapeutics—exemplified by Matt Might’s blog post “My Son’s Killer”—increasingly feasible.  
- Grindhouse Wetware’s “Bottlenose v0.1” wearable converts sonar, UV, Wi-Fi, and thermal data into haptic magnetic feedback via an implanted finger magnet, though chronic inflammation from vibration remains a concern.