- NASA’s Curiosity raw-image manifest (http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/image/image_manifest.json) was highlighted as an open data set for visualization or analysis projects.  
- BioCurious, a flagship Bay-Area community biolab, is experiencing an internal collapse after key organizers resigned; $100/month membership fees were judged unaffordable and the lab’s value was questioned beyond basic gel electrophoresis.  
- Participants argued that membership-fee models are unsustainable for community labs and proposed low-cost, scrap-based fabrication approaches (inspired by Gingery) as a more viable path, especially in regions like India.  
- A new “nanotech-house” project in West Oakland will host TEM and Zetasizer instruments in a garage and operate as a live-in hacker co-op for synthetic-biology and nanotech experimentation.  
- A startup described its current revenue model as contracted market research while aiming to map emerging lab work to 3–7-year commercial horizons; skeptics warned that without clear ROI the concept will struggle to attract paying clients.  
- glims1, a newcomer researching eye bio-augmentation, was directed to the channel’s paperbot and a curated list of ~1,500 university EZproxy URLs (https://raw.github.com/kanzure/ezproxy-urls/master/urls.txt) to bypass paywalls.  
- The open-rTMS (open-source repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) project on SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/p/open-rtms/svn/31/tree/trunk/) lacks a Makefile and has Windows compilation issues; veterans recommended decoupling the GUI from stimulation code and compiling with g++ instead of Eclipse.