• Senator John Cornyn publicly challenged Attorney General Holder over the prosecution of Aaron Swartz, releasing a critical letter that prompted channel members to encourage citizen feedback and further scrutiny of the case.  
• Aaron Swartz’s posthumous data liberation effort was highlighted: he scraped ~900 k public-domain books from Google Books that are now archived at archive.org but still require OCR cleanup.  
• Channel participants reverse-engineered JoVE’s Flash player, extracted direct CDN links to full .mov protocol videos, and bypassed the 30-second preview limit, then shared videos covering optogenetics, zebrafish brain ventricle drainage, and in utero electroporation.  
• A new East-Bay DIYBio group launched, meeting monthly at SudoRoom in downtown Oakland, while the channel’s wiki now lists 45 active DIYbio labs worldwide (diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/groups).  
• Debate over the value of university education framed it as primarily a social-networking and credentialing service versus a necessary environment for structured labs, peer feedback, and safety compliance—especially critical in biology where bench skills and reagents are hard to replicate at home.  
• An Excel-induced gene-name corruption blog post (nsaunders.wordpress.com) was circulated as a cautionary tale against using spreadsheets for bioinformatics.