• A participant proposed a DIY route to nanometre-scale CPU/GPU fabrication that allegedly eliminates the $100 k–$500 M NRE of photolithography by re-using a GPU memory-layout trick and reconfigurable hardware, claiming it scales to fully 3-D circuits and can be done “at home for virtually no cost.”

• The channel contrasted this scheme with existing open-source micro-fab efforts such as the HomeCMOS project (code.google.com/p/homecmos) and debated whether “own-the-factory” models still matter when cloud EC2 already delivers cheap high-performance compute.

• Kanzure circulated the Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap report (http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf) to argue that recent cognitive-science advances are coming from brain emulation rather than traditional AI research.

• Discussion of China’s BGI project to sequence high-IQ individuals for IVF embryo selection referenced a Vice video “Is China Engineering Smarter Babies?” and noted that prenatal Down-syndrome screening is already widespread in China, while current germline-editing tools were judged too crude for meaningful eugenics.

• Participants criticized the proliferation of Google Docs and embedded media in open-source hardware documentation (e.g., OSE wiki) and endorsed “a bunch of markdown files in a git repo” as the most maintainable, offline-friendly alternative.

• A deep dive into PCR history covered Kary Mullis’s 1993 Chemistry Nobel, the Cetus/Perkin-Elmer “Mr. Cycle” thermocycler, Roche’s $300 million acquisition of PCR patents, and the Stanford v. Roche Supreme Court ruling that inventors—not institutions—own federally funded inventions.

• Paperbot—an open-source IRC bot that scrapes paywalled journal articles—was demonstrated live; it successfully retrieved a Nature paper but failed on Wiley and ACS sites, prompting plans to improve scrapers and adopt human-readable filenames.

• Bina Technologies’ $6.5 M raise to apply “big-data” analytics to genomics was met with skepticism that current sequencing workflows actually generate large data volumes, while Microryza (“Kickstarter for science”) was noted as a new Y Combinator entrant.

• A performance benchmark showed custom Cython code (via scipy.weave) outperforming Numba’s auto-JIT and scipy.spatial.distance.jaccard for Jaccard distance calculations, with the discrepancy to be reported to the Numba mailing list.

• A novel browser-tracking technique was shared: embedding persistent identifiers in cached images or ETags to re-identify users without cookies, with a Wikipedia reference on ETag-based tracking provided.