- Stanford’s Karl Deisseroth lab released “CLARITY,” a freely available hydrogel protocol that renders intact mouse brains optically transparent while preserving 97 % of proteins, enabling whole-organ imaging without sectioning; protocol and datasets are hosted at clarityresourcecenter.org.  
- Channel members dismissed consumer EEG headsets (Emotiv EPOC, NeuroSky, Necomimi) as functionally limited, noting that even open-source reverse-engineering (emokit) yields only ~2 reliable commands and that gyroscopes, not neural data, drive most “mind-control” demos.  
- Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and KPCB formed the “Glass Collective” to fund startups building on Google Glass; discussion centered on the need for cloud video pipelines (e.g., kanzure’s proposed “zencoder” SaaS) to offload real-time computer-vision processing from wearable HUDs.  
- Elsevier’s $70 M purchase of Mendeley sparked debate on open-access credibility, with participants advocating community-built alternatives like Zotero and citing PeerJ as evidence of researcher backlash against closed publishers.  
- SKDB, an open-source hardware package-management system under development by kanzure and fenn, aims to version-control CAD files, BOMs, and supplier URLs so machines can automatically resolve build dependencies; contributors are invited to review the spec and begin packaging existing designs.  
- Allen Institute for Brain Science was identified as a high-value open-science target because of its $300 M+ investment in mouse and human brain atlases and its policy of releasing raw datasets to the public.  
- Practical limits of current body-mod and tissue-engineering technologies were surveyed: limb-lengthening surgery is available but painful and slow, while 3-D-printed tissue grafts may reach clinics within five years; full body replacement remains speculative.  
- A curated reading path for DIY biology newcomers was shared: skip traditional textbooks, start with the DIYbio FAQ book list (Alberts’ Molecular Biology of the Cell, synthetic-biology primers), and use Wikipedia/YouTube to fill gaps on topics like the RNA-world hypothesis.