- A participant is hacking a Blu-ray burner’s 405 nm laser to create a DIY micro-fabrication tool, aiming to extend the working distance from 0.3 mm to 2 mm for photoresist exposure.  
- The group debated the technical details of transcranial high-frequency random noise stimulation (tRNS), citing a 2008 J. Neuroscience paper on cortical excitability and discussing how to generate a pure AC signal with an Arduino and audio amplifier.  
- Two open-source liquid-handling robots—Kliment’s “Splotbot” (reprap-based, 6-syringe carriage) and “Chemobot” (20 mm T-slot frame, multi-servo firmware hack)—were showcased; both have working prototypes and videos but lack comprehensive documentation.  
- Additional open-hardware automation projects were shared: “Dozer” (automated printed-part mover), “Dye” (open yarn-dyeing device), and the aforementioned “Splotbot,” all hosted on GitHub.  
- A 2011 Wired article on “human flesh copyright” was circulated, prompting discussion about intellectual-property ownership of engineered human tissue.  
- John Baez highlighted Anselm Levskaya’s “polyHédronisme” web tool (levskaya.github.io/polyhedronisme) for generating complex polyhedra via simple text commands.  
- Participants critiqued patent-analytics jargon—patent mapping, citation analysis, white-space mapping—as enterprise buzzwords that offer little actionable insight for open-source hardware developers.  
- Safety culture in biology/chemistry automation was debated, with emphasis on contamination risk to experiments from open-frame lab robots and human handling.  
- A contributor offered to archive a set of NASA aerothermal-research papers on protuberance heating, some ITAR-restricted, from NTRS.  
- A Russian FTP mirror (ftp://s208.math.msu.su/) was discovered; its Cyrillic filenames initially obscured its contents, but Kliment offered to translate and assess its value.