- Zero State is organizing a crypto-party inside the OpenQwaq virtual-collaboration platform within two months and is considering a mixed-reality London meeting in May to promote both cryptography literacy and adoption of the Smalltalk-based OpenQwaq/Terf client.  
- eleitl has leased a 1 kEUR/month wet-lab near the Martinsried biotech campus and estimates that duplicating its 100 kEUR-equipment suite would need ~2.5 kEUR/month in steady funding; his “snail project” (using Lymnaea stagnalis as a 20 k-neuron upload model) is budgeted at 20 kEUR in used hardware plus one person-year.  
- OpenQwaq’s last semi-open build (2012-04-22) is painful to compile, lacks open-codec video, and is being superseded by the closed Terf fork and a new HTML5/JavaScript rewrite called the Virtual World Framework; participants are hunting for a reproducible server/client build for self-hosting.  
- OpenWorm is releasing a browser-based C. elegans anatomical simulation (http://browser.openworm.org/) and all code on GitHub, while 3scan (Thiel-backed) is developing microtome-based 3-D neural reconstruction; kanzure mirrored Randal Koene’s orphaned Netmorph morphology generator at http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/netmorph/.  
- nmz787 is designing open-source nanochannel DNA-synthesis hardware that uses single-molecule optical or electrical sensing to create “numerically controlled enzymes” capable of on-demand arbitrary sequence output.  
- A universal, pip-installable Python library is being sketched to abstract vendor-specific spectrometer protocols, ingest raw USB-serial dumps, and export standardized JSON so downstream plugins can calculate pH, DNA concentration, etc., without proprietary Windows software.  
- Participants debated energy and civilizational risk: eleitl argues World3 is qualitatively correct, that a war-scale crash program should have started 30 years ago, and that current DOE budgets (e.g., $770 M for nuclear vs. $60 M for storage) are “completely ass-backwards,” while Germany’s 300 GWp/year thin-film PV rollout is cited as evidence renewables can out-compete new nuclear builds.  
- Regulatory hurdles for large-volume vitrification and connectomics-scale imaging were discussed: Fahy’s rabbit-kidney work is state-of-the-art, but fresh mammalian cadavers for perfusion trials are nearly unobtainable in the EU/US, pushing research toward less-regulated regions, while dual-beam FIB/SEM systems offer 0.5 Å resolution and cryo-sectioning for potential microtome replacement.  
- DIY neuromodulation efforts include non-invasive mouse motor-cortex stimulation with sub-MHz ultrasound (linked YouTube demo) and reverse-engineered consumer neuro-devices such as the Emotiv EPOC (emokit) and Fitbit data liberation maintained by qdot.  
- The European Commission awarded €1 billion each to Henry Markram’s Human Brain Project and graphene research, while China launched a $350 M, 140-PhD molten-salt-reactor institute judged “too late” by participants.