• Aptamer Base (aptamerbase.semanticscience.org) launched as an open, community-curated knowledge base on Freebase that catalogs nucleic-acid and peptide aptamers discovered via SELEX, providing structured sequences and experimental metadata for open-source drug-discovery efforts.

• A PLOS ONE paper on 10-mer sequence tags robust to indels was dissected; participants calculated that 4-edit-distance codes can only encode ~4,000 unique tags in 10-mer space, highlighting the combinatorial limits of short DNA barcodes.

• DIY/open-source biology infrastructure showcased: a bench-top bioreactor at BossLab, a curated list of free biology textbooks (http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq/books), a global directory of local DIYbio groups (http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/groups), and cloud-lab startup Transcriptic as a model for remote biology labor arbitrage.

• Economic consensus emerged that formal biology or biomedical-engineering degrees yield poor ROI ($35 k–$52 k senior-scientist salaries) compared to self-taught computer-science skills ($104 k–$159 k for DSP or software architects), with Python and Ruby dominating Bay-Area startup hiring and Java/C# paying well in the Midwest.

• Practical career advice: skip or audit college, build two focused demo projects (Flask/Rails apps), host code on GitHub as a portfolio link, and leverage MIT OpenCourseWare and open-source communities; recruiters value demonstrable projects and interview performance over credentials.

• kanzure introduced “bit-squatting,” a novel memory-corruption attack concept analogous to typo-squatting where single-bit RAM flips redirect ad-network traffic to attacker-controlled URLs, illustrating the security implications of hardware-level data integrity.

• Mumble promoted as a low-latency, open-source, NSA-resistant voice-chat solution runnable on a Raspberry Pi, addressing secure small-group communication for distributed research teams.

• Open-science tooling discussed: paperbot (https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot) for automated retrieval of paywalled articles and handling of PMC/NIH free-PDF edge cases, underscoring ongoing efforts to circumvent paywalls for open research access.