- The EU’s €3 M “Si Elegans” FET-Open project (April 2013) aims to emulate the 302-neuron C. elegans nervous system on a large FPGA array coupled to a biomechanical body simulation; participants debate whether this top-down, hardware-first strategy is over-engineered compared to the open-source, bottom-up whole-organism model pursued by the OpenWorm community.

- Elsevier’s acquisition of Mendeley triggers warnings that the platform will soon purge copyrighted PDFs and tighten access controls, reinforcing the need for decentralized, open alternatives for scientific literature sharing.

- SparkFun releases its entire parts catalog as open 3-D CAD models on GitHub (sparkfun/3D_Models) to accelerate open-hardware prototyping, while NIH’s Office of Technology Transfer (ott.nih.gov) is identified as a surprisingly powerful gatekeeper of IP rights on federally funded research.

- CLARITY tissue-clearing microscopy is proposed as a scalable, synapse-preserving alternative to electron-microscopy connectomics, though questions remain about whether membrane-bound proteins survive the hydrogel clearing process.

- Early Bitcoin history is reconstructed: Satoshi Nakamoto’s first public posts (late 2008–Feb 2009) were routed through Tor exit nodes to Perry Metzger’s cryptography list and Michel Bauwens’ p2presearch list; Marc Fawzi’s 2008 “energy-as-currency” concept is recalled as a precursor lacking a verifiable consensus mechanism.

- Ralph Merkle’s dual legacy is celebrated: co-inventor of public-key cryptography (Merkle puzzles, Merkle trees, Merkle–Damgård construction) and 1998 Feynman-prize-winning nanotechnologist for ab-initio diamond-surface tool calculations.

- Practical tactics for large-scale automated web scraping are shared, including captcha-solving services (deathbycaptcha), rotating proxies, Yahoo BOSS API usage, and strategies to evade Google’s behavioral throttling.

- Channel members criticize NCBI’s closed-source BLAST tools for lacking a public bug tracker, and a Microsoft Research paper on “Logged Bandits” is praised for its elegant online-learning algorithm balancing exploration and exploitation.