• The community condemned the secrecy around the “Bio Tech N Beyond” event, arguing that cross-posting across regional DIYbio lists is necessary to prevent abuse and fragmentation.  
• nmz787 introduced openSpectrometer, an open-source spectrometer project, and the group discussed licensing (OSI-approved), hosting (GitHub Pages vs diyhpl.us ikiwiki), and naming conventions.  
• paperbot, an IRC bot for retrieving paywalled papers, was debugged for IEEE parsing; retrieved papers are archived at http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/paperbot/.  
• OpenWorm’s plan to adopt the PSICS neuronal simulator—modeling every ion channel as a discrete entity—was questioned for computational realism.  
• Lab-on-a-chip pH sensing: abetusk sought miniature, reusable pH probes; nmz787 suggested ISFET sensors, on-chip Ag/AgCl micro-electrodes, and linked a paper on microfluidic pH chips with integrated pneumatic controls.  
• The $1 million Israel BrainTech Prize was announced for “novel technologies to enhance human brain function,” including brain stimulation and brain-machine interfaces.  
• kanzure mined WADA’s ADAMS anti-doping system, revealing it tracks athletes in chess, e-sports, firefighting, and wheelchair fencing, and appears to expose passwords and personal whereabouts.  
• Efforts to bypass Ustream’s AMF handshake aim to batch-download and archive House and Senate videos on the Internet Archive for public accountability.  
• The “Farewell to Bioinformatics” rant sparked debate: practitioners defended rigorous work (Michael Jordan’s ML protein modeling, Daphne Koller’s gene-network reconstruction) while acknowledging poor reproducibility and the wet-lab vs computational divide.