• A Harvard team is offering free Illumina sequencing (MiSeq 150 bp single-end, soon HiSeq 2×100 paired-end) for a bacterial genome that may encode a novel nitrogenase; the first run revealed six distinct 16S sequences, and the published N-terminal sequences are believed to be from a contaminant, so the group will mine raw reads to locate the true gene.

• ParahSail1n volunteered his personal compute cluster to assemble the reads and expects to recover the nitrogenase even in fragmented contigs, while warning that CO-dehydrogenases and xanthine dehydrogenases could mislead annotation.

• Participants shared a practical open-access workaround: using mitmproxy/libmproxy to inject university ezproxy session cookies transparently, allowing a single local proxy (http://myserver.lan/resources) to serve pay-walled papers to multiple household devices without exposing credentials.

• The U.S. military’s BRL-CAD team released a massive pull request that merges years of internal STEP Class Library (SCL) improvements into the public stepcode repository, modernizing the NIST standard for CAD data exchange.

• A “meta-medicine” startup was discussed that charges seriously ill patients to perform exhaustive literature searches and expert outreach to identify the single best available treatment, highlighting structural limits of evidence-based medicine such as drug-company influence on journal reprint revenue and editorial bias toward “newest and best” therapies.

• Aaron Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access” efforts were linked via the Google Group “slwaterflow,” and it was noted that Swartz authored the original Tor2web proxy.

• Corning’s Flowell perfusion plate for automated cell-culture media exchange was highlighted as a contamination-reducing alternative to manual media changes, especially valuable when a single contaminant can erase 4–6 months of mammalian cell work.

• Serum-free adaptation of HepG2 cells was described, including weaning from Opti-MEM to DMEM without serum or antibiotics and the resulting loss of cell adhesion, alongside discussion of the high cost of serum-free media and recombinant enzymes driven by mad-cow-era restrictions on bovine-derived reagents.