- The New Yorker released “Strongbox,” a Tor-based whistle-blower submission system originally written by Aaron Swartz and now open-sourced on GitHub at deaddrop/deaddrop.  
- Armodafinil was identified as the longer-lasting, single-enantiomer form of modafinil, widely viewed as a patent-extension maneuver by Cephalon as modafinil’s exclusivity expires.  
- OMICS Publishing Group, an Indian open-access conglomerate, threatened blogger Jeffrey Beall with a $1 billion defamation suit for exposing its spam conferences and $3,000 post-acceptance fees, prompting discussion of how similar phishing tactics could be repurposed to recruit credentialed researchers as paid startup advisors.  
- NASA’s NTRS shutdown left ~85 % of its 500 k aerospace documents offline; participants mapped remaining sources (Internet Archive, spaceflightnews.net, JPL DSpace, ston.jsc.nasa.gov) and began a coordinated crawl using 20 TB of donated storage, with pdfparanoia to strip ITAR-restricted content.  
- Reverse-engineering revealed NTRS exposes ~847 k total records via OAI-PMH but only ~55 k public PDFs; direct integer IDs and resumption tokens were documented to automate recovery.  
- Science Exchange spam advertised whole-exome sequencing at an average of $1,224.50 per sample, illustrating the rapid commoditization of high-throughput genomics.  
- Stanford’s CLARITY technique for intact-brain 3-D imaging and molecular profiling—using lipid-clearing hydrogel embedding—was highlighted as a breakthrough for simultaneous structural and functional neural analysis.  
- A private paperbot fork designed to share paywalled papers via SOCKS proxy tunnels saw zero adoption among ~30 potential users, reinforcing the claim that social inertia, not technology, is the main barrier to open-access progress.