• The European Commission’s €1 billion Human Brain Project was dissected: its 78-page flagship document budgets 7,148 person-years and lists neuromorphic hardware (BrainScaleS, SpiNNaker, FACETS) plus “principles of neural computation” as key deliverables, while participants debated whether the grant raises the posterior probability that we already live in a simulation.

• A grassroots push to evolve biologically seeded neural networks (10–100 k cell types) via genetic algorithms was proposed, with offers of CPU time on university clusters and upcoming HBP supercomputers, and the group compared ultra-low-cost hardware options such as Parallella’s 16/64-core Epiphany chip and wafer-scale cellular-automaton MD engines for femtosecond-to-millisecond molecular dynamics.

• Open-source spectrometer development advanced: nmz787 and kanzure released the “spectrometers” Python package on PyPI (https://github.com/kanzure/python-spectrometers) that abstracts USB/serial devices behind a uniform API, debates data structures (OrderedDict vs. list of tuples), and explores headless, GUI-optional deployment for mobile or embedded use.

• Practical DIY biology guidance was exchanged: 400× optical magnification with methylene blue stain suffices for Barr-body (X-chromatin) detection; <$200 microscope-plus-webcam setups plus open-source blob detection can automate cell counting; and community HiSeq2000 sequencing runs were priced at ~$2.7 k per lane for 60 Gb paired-end reads with Illumina TruSeq library prep.

• Cost and logistics of open-access knowledge were scrutinized: mirroring Library Genesis’ 10–50 TB catalog on dedicated Hetzner servers was weighed against bandwidth limits; browser-based torrent distribution via the BitTorrent Torque plugin was deemed more viable than pure JavaScript; and a paywalled paper on inter-library-loan inefficiencies was retrieved by an automated “paperbot.”