• The Methuselah Foundation offered a $10 k matched grant to sequence Steve Coles’ tumor and implant his cancer cells in rats for personalized-therapy testing, triggering debate on whether today’s genomic characterization yields actionable treatment options and whether the approach is “better than being dead” even when druggable targets are scarce.

• A Scientific American blog post dissecting the glowing-plant Kickstarter revealed patent conflicts with BioGlow Inc., use of a 1986 copyrighted image, and the tension between Genome Compiler Corp.’s open-source rhetoric and its proprietary cloud platform; participants recommended open-source alternatives such as Clotho, TinkerCell, NCBI, and the iGEM Parts Registry for transparent synthetic-biology design.

• Octopart’s API v3 now exposes direct datasheet links, adds “Show/Hide” and “Slice” directives to shrink JSON payloads, and supports CORS for browser-side queries, improving open-hardware sourcing workflows.

• A 2009 patent (US20090056802) by Ely Rabani describing mechanosynthetic assembly of diamondoid nanostructures was surfaced, predating the better-known Freitas patent and highlighting early sci.nanotech contributions.

• The antibiotic-discovery slowdown since the 1970s was attributed to the exhaustion of easily found natural strains and the ~$100 M FDA testing barrier, with fully synthetic examples like ciprofloxacin, linezolid, and sulfa drugs noted as rare successes.

• Numenta’s “Hierarchical Temporal Memory” and Jeff Hawkins’ book “On Intelligence” were criticized for lacking rigorous benchmarks and formal algorithmic descriptions, while participants debated how to test the NuPIC algorithm against state-of-the-art temporal-sequence predictors and shared resources including a PDF of the book (http://fennetic.net/irc/on_intelligence.pdf) and archived neural-network lecture notes (http://web.archive.org/web/20081205173159/http://heybryan.org/school/buildingbrains/all.html).

• The EU Human Brain Project’s €1 B flagship plan was clarified as a set of well-scoped research deliverables rather than the media-hyped “whole-brain emulation by 2015,” with calls for more open software releases.

• K. Eric Drexler’s early Common Lisp code contributions to nanoengineering simulation tools (cavstuf-0.2.2) were discovered, surprising participants who knew him only as a theoretician.