- A 2010 Science paper describing “Reconstituting Organ-Level Lung Functions on a Chip” was mirrored at diyhpl.us to bypass paywalls, underscoring the channel’s commitment to open access for cutting-edge bio-engineering research.  
- The Public Lab $30 webcam-based spectrometer was judged scientifically inadequate; an open-hardware alternative (openspectrometer.com) is being designed with KiCad/Orcad schematics and an FTDI USB interface to deliver laboratory-grade performance.  
- Participants live-reverse-engineered the American Physical Society’s new image CAPTCHA (select Einstein photos), harvesting image variants, hashing them with MD5, and proposing automated solvers ranging from OpenCV face detection to Mechanical Turk to restore scriptable paper downloads.  
- Google Groups quietly restored RSS feeds and cleaner URLs; message IDs can be cross-derived via base64 decoding, improving automated archival of mailing-list content.  
- San Diego’s DIYbio scene is shifting from public meetups to a closed Google Group (biotechnbeyond) and a forthcoming domain, sparking debate about exclusivity within the open-science ecosystem.  
- Counter Culture Labs (East Bay) reported a surprising surge in attendance after listing events on Meetup.com, challenging assumptions that the platform had become irrelevant.  
- A Hacker News salary thread (item 5802295) was mined for real-time SF developer compensation data to guide startup hiring strategies.  
- Zotero was endorsed for offline PDF management, metadata tagging, and automated file renaming, with both Firefox-extension and standalone versions recommended.