- Medigram’s new ultra-miniature EEG/ECG board claims battery-free operation by harvesting RF energy from nearby cell phones; participants debated whether sub-microwatt neural amplifiers can survive real-world EMI without heavy shielding.  
- HacDC’s open-source “Mirage335 Biosignal Amp” offers a 3-D-printable, battery-powered EEG/ECG/EMG amplifier that references the leg to cancel common-mode noise, contrasting with commercial high-impedance designs.  
- Ray Kurzweil’s hiring as Google’s “Director of Engineering” sparked skepticism about deliverables; Peter Norvig’s endorsement led to calls for benchmarking Google’s OCR against open-source Tesseract using synthetic Unicode test pages.  
- juri_ is building an open-source “cell printer” that uses multi-camera feedback for micron-level cell pick-and-place, motivated by his father’s kidney failure and his own diabetes risk; the goal is fully free-software hardware for regenerative medicine.  
- Copenhagen Suborbitals was praised as a working open-source, non-profit sub-orbital manned rocketry effort, while Eric Hunting’s circulated post lamented the broader space-advocacy community’s failure to execute even simple DIY projects.  
- Participants dissected the economics of U.S. dialysis: Medicare covers 90 % of treatments but only 66 % of revenue; the remaining privately insured patients generate 34 % of revenue and nearly all profits, illustrating extreme cross-subsidization.  
- A 1970s Japanese “washing-machine dialysis” design—blood coil in a household washer—was cited as evidence that dialysis hardware is intrinsically simple, raising questions about why modern systems cost $3,000–$5,000 per month.  
- eBay listings show used dialysis machines for under $5 k, prompting discussion of why home hemodialysis fell from 40 % adoption in the 1970s to <0.4 % today, and whether open-source or DIY dialysis machines could re-emerge despite FDA hurdles.