- **DIY micro-electrode arrays**: participants compared commercial flat arrays (~$200) and Utah arrays (~$4 k), with ThomasEgi arguing that Utah-style devices are “not that hard” to fabricate if you have the right tools; eleitl is pursuing an open-source design while archels suggested repurposing CMOS sensors and started a Google Groups thread for collaboration.

- **paperbot**: kanzure released an IRC bot that uses the Zotero translation-server to fetch and mirror pay-walled academic papers on demand; examples included Nature Protocols and Elsevier articles, making literature instantly available in-channel.

- **Tool fragility & data lock-in**: CircuitLab’s new EE Stack Exchange integration was criticized for preventing schematic/netlist export; broader worries were voiced about web-only tools (Java chemistry simulators broken by JVM security updates, opaque Chrome packaged apps) versus durable native software.

- **DIYbio progress audit**: The Scientist’s “Do-It-Yourself Revolution” issue was circulated, but participants judged the past year’s tangible outputs as “two hackerspaces and zero projects,” citing only a broken-printer Instructable, an Arduino PCR thermocycler, and Cathal’s still-secret custom plasmid; John Schloendorn’s new reagent-supply company and openbiotech.com were noted as commercial, not community, advances.

- **Urban & regenerative agriculture**: jrayhawk linked Allan Savory’s TED talk on reversing desertification via managed grazing, while chris_99 shared an Atlantic Cities article on aquaponics as a closed-loop fish-and-vegetable system for cities.

- **Nutrition science**: calcium supplementation was deemed harmful unless vitamin A/D/K2 and the Ca:Mg ratio are properly balanced; the discussion emphasized micronutrient interactions over single-mineral fixes.

- **Eureqa symbolic regression**: highlighted as a tool for extracting physical laws from CRC Handbook tables and reverse-engineering game logic (e.g., Pokémon map connections), with side debate on the legality of mining copyrighted reference data.

- **Collaborative writing & open science**: Authorea (a ShareLaTeX-like platform) was flagged on Hacker News as a promising open-science authoring tool, while the protocol-sharing site Methodmint (re-branded abl.es) was criticized for stagnation and for accidentally exposing database credentials in its public Trac.